- Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac how to#
- Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac movie#
- Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac install#
- Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac portable#
Any portable platter-based hard drive should fit easily in a purse or even a coat pocket. These are called generically "2.5-inch drives," though they are actually a smidge wider than that.
Hard drive-based portables make use inside of the same kinds of platter-drive mechanisms used in laptops.
(See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.)Īt the other end of the physical-size spectrum are portable drives. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS-for "direct attached storage"-to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them.
Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac install#
Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their defining characteristic is the ability to swap drives in and out of their multi-bay chassis easily, so most provide quick access to the drive bays at the front of the device. They're mostly intended for professional use in editing studios, surveillance control rooms, and the like. The largest desktop drives are often much, much bulkier than the first two categories, so big that you'll want to stick them under your desk or in a dedicated server closet. (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.) We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work. In that case, your best option is a desktop-class hard drive.
Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac movie#
If you have a large media-file collection-perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff-you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it. Physical Size Matters: Get a Desktop Drive, or a Portable One? And let's not even talk about the cost of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs.
A 2TB SSD, though? Expect to pay at least two to three times as much as you would for that 2TB hard drive. You can find a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (possibly even a 4TB one, depending on the day) for less than $100. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.Īnd portable hard drives can be a great value if what you need is raw capacity above all else. Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells-similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM-to save data. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar by far, but first you need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD. Weighing the Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD? This guide will help you make sense of all these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive. Other factors include the physical size of the drive (is it designed to be carted around, or to sit on your desk?), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. The drive capacity is the most important factor to consider, and it can increase or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs.
Best external dvd drive 2017 for mac how to#
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