Generally heard good about sandisk extreme or samsung t5/t7.

LaCie or Samsung!

T7

I use WD - they always worked well for me!

WD External at Best Buy

The best?

OWC Thunderblade

ok... one problem with a drive is that when it fails... it fails. maybe someone with more knowledge than I regarding computer things can recover photos but I cannot.

i have two back ups.

WD 5TB Elements Portable HDD, External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, Plug and Play Ready - WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN

both are same piece of hardware. from amazon. they were not plug and play ready... i had to format these disks using my Mac software but it was a simple task.

anyway, the first one has my photos

the second one backs up my entire computer including contents of the first drive using Mac's Time Capsule feature. it does this every night. alternatively u can back up to a cloud somewhere.

A few recommendations

If you are editing from it than it may be helpful to get an SSD drive for the increased speed, I like the San disc extreme portable SSD for price and value.

If it’s just backup storage than HDD drives are better in my opinion. My personal backup system is to buy 2 1 terabyte drives every year or 2 ( I like the Toshiba caniva, but any name brand will do) I keep one copy at my house and the second copy at a family members house and keep jpegs in a cloud drive as well. When the external drives fill up I get 2 more and continue. I prefer that over one (or 2) huge drives so as to not put Ann my eggs in one basket.

The best is the one that doesn’t fail. I’ve been a freelance photographer for thirty years and I have only owned GTech drives. I pair drives as insurance in case of a failure or other accident. In that time, I’ve had one drive failure and simply replaced it and copied the data from the matching drive. Their mini drives stack well on the desktop and the paired drive goes into a fire resistant box in the safe.

I swear by Samsung T7 drives. I’ve got a few and they work great.

Anything from a known brand should be fairly reliable. I’ve been using a 2tb usbc sandisk ssd drive for years. It’s where I store my steam library when I boot into windows for games. 

If you are going to be mobile get an ssd. No moving parts means less chance something can break while you are moving about. 

Mechanical Hard drives are fairly cheap. Honestly they’ve been cheap for decades already. Get an extra one to do time machine backups locally when at home. Then you don’t have to worry about your media drive dying. It doesn’t have to be fast. Just has to keep local backups for emergencies. 

I really like Samsung T9. I was able to find a 4 TB T9 on OfferUp for $80. Score!

You need more than 1 SSD ... + 1 for on-site + 1 for off-site backups,

++ 1 for TM backups

That is 4 SSDs

Smaller SSD are better than 4TB

4 x USB4 SSD will cost you more than $1,000....

USB3.2 Gen 2 are most cost effective.

 Standard Samsung T7 drives - I have 2 are good

But

• No shielding/rugged they tend to o'heat
• No extra security .. finger print... just trouble .. MacOs encryption is better

Just Plain T7

All T7 have 20GB (or higher cache) ... once cache is full it will write at 350 MB/s just like T5...

If it is 80% full its speed can degrade ... it is a common NVME problem..

If you're on a newer Mac (capable of USB4), the new Corsair EX400U 4TB drive is very fast.

https://preview.redd.it/4i6er8egklgf1.png?width=402&format=png&auto=webp&s=6ecccf7c676c163fd899e938b7cb02cb181f3061

Agree with the other poster, you can't go wrong with the Samsung T7s. There are also WD SanDisk drives, but they've had a few issues recently, so I'm not recommending those right now. But the Samsung T7 would be perfect, 1TB for $80 or 2TB for $120 on Amazon right now.

I just picked up a 2TB Samsung T7 touch for my 2019 iMac a couple weeks ago. It’s now connected as my boot drive and has really sped things up. Very happy with it.

i’ve personally had good luck with WD drives, both bus and wall powered. I also quite like samsung’s SSDs, i’ve had a 500gb T5 for going on five years and had no issues. You can get 2TB T7s for around $150 now

Samsung T7

Do you want an SSD or a HDD? An SSD is more expensive and much faster by a long shot, but HDDs have more storage per dollar. If it's data you don't intend to access all the time, HDDs are usually the better option in my opinion. However, if you're going to carry it around often, an SSD is superior because it has fewer moving parts to break if you drop it.

I would recommend that whatever option you go with, do NOT use any password protection software that comes on the device. Many of these password protects are seriously flawed and quite a few of them are fairly ineffective. There's a lot written about this topic on the Internet. Instead, I would format the drive as encrypted APFS and do it that way. You can do that with any drive, whether or not it has some built in password protection.

I need it to store a few docs and photos, what would u recommend?

“Best” would be a Thunderbolt 3/4 drive. They’re significantly faster, but also significantly more expensive.

However, most people don’t need Thunderbolt speeds. I think the T7 Shield strikes a good balance between performance and price. I have 4 of these (2 TB each) and they’ve been good.

So i’m basically asking the same questions you are but i’m learning a lot through this thread here. I have been using a 4 TB MyBook External HDD and the other day it completely locked me out of hard drive regardless if I put the correct password on it or not. I’m looking to buy a new one but i’ve never heard of an NVMe SSD or an NVMe enclosure but these honestly sound like the best options to go for. I’m assuming a samsung NVMe SSD is the best option to go for but does the brand for the enclosure matter?

A thunderbolt NVME enclosure

this one? https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Envoy-Express-Thunderbolt-Enclosure/dp/B08LYQPRPJ/ref=sr_1_3?hvadid=570432152868&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1014452&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=8384098234435131041&hvtargid=kwd-502638087837&hydadcr=18039_13462301&keywords=nvme+thunderbolt+3+enclosure&qid=1694572217&sr=8-3

u/Trash2030s

A thunderbolt NVME enclosure

this one? https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Envoy-Express-Thunderbolt-Enclosure/dp/B08LYQPRPJ/ref=sr_1_3?hvadid=570432152868&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1014452&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=8384098234435131041&hvtargid=kwd-502638087837&hydadcr=18039_13462301&keywords=nvme+thunderbolt+3+enclosure&qid=1694572217&sr=8-3

u/Trash2030s

Anyone tried those budget drives on Amazon that say like “2TB” but cost \$20? I bought one just to test it and it turned out to be a scam — it only stores a few gigs and overwrites itself. Be careful with those too-good-to-be-true deals.

Honestly, I just use my old laptop 2.5 HDD tossed into a Ugreen enclosure and have 1TB of storage for free, which is way faster than any drive I had for a long margin.

if you put a cheap sata SSD into that same enclosure you will get higher than a dope guy on payday.

How much storage do most people actually *need* though? I always feel like I'm overbuying. Got a 4TB last year and have barely used half of it. Wondering if 2TB would’ve been smarter.

I just got the Samsung T9 and I’m honestly blown away. It’s faster than the T7, with better heat control. If you’re doing anything intensive like editing or working with RAW files, it makes a huge difference. Also, it's tiny but feels premium.

Pro tip: if you value your data, don’t rely on *just* an external drive. Always keep at least two copies — one local, one cloud (Backblaze or Google Drive). Drives fail. I learned the hard way after losing all my travel vlogs.

I asked a few Genius Bar and Tech support folks what they used for external drives and the majority said LaCie.

The San Disk Extreme PRO portable SSD has been nothing but good to me me! I picked up the 256gb version to run Bootcamp for Windows 10 apps like Revit and V-Ray and the casual occasional gaming. Super durable (IP55) and super consistent.

LaCie SSD, amazing cokes with usb c and a and it very small and quick, highly recommend

Samsung Portable SSD T5.

I bought the WD My Passport Ultra and it's a good little device. The cable is a bit stiff and hard to pull out once it's connected to the laptop, so I just use the USB-C cable that came with my iPad Pro. Not sure on the speeds because it seems quite slow (35MB/s or something on the Black Magic speed test) but I've partitioned it to have 1TB for Time Machine and then the other 1TB for file storage (so I can use it with Windows as well).

Hard Drive only, or SSDs are fine?

Most of NEW SSDs are formatted as PC NTFS format.

Use Disk Utility to format it as APFS

Why aren’t you using Time Machine?!

I never understood why Apple users think they need a "for Mac" storage solution.

There's the WD MyPassport and a WD MyPassport for Mac. The difference? One has a USB-c cable and is a different color. They're 100% identical beyond those two things.

Just buy a drive and format it APFS. If you need to use it on Windows and Mac format it exFAT. You're good to go.

I use Samsung T7's. They're insanely small and portable, inexpensive, and super quick.

You can also opt to buy an SSD and put it into a portable enclosure; get one with good USB-C speeds and you can pop in whatever size SSD you want. Got a SanDisk Ultra 3D 2TB and enclosure for US$190 and doubling that up to have a backup is super cost effective.

Sandisk extreme - even the old ones are fast since they are ssd. Slowest is still 550 transfer speed.

Samsung SSD T’s or Glyph!

The model of MacBook Pro will affect your max transfer speed. If it’s 2019 or newer it should accept USB 3.2 Gen 2 for 10Gb(gigabit not gigabyte) transfer speeds.