What Hard Drive? (Mac)

In this article I will provide you with a list of the best hard drives you can get to match your amazingly designed and engineered Mac. And also provide you with a list and specs of the best harddrives so that you can compare them for yourself.
The thing about computers is that the hard drive technology moves much faster than computer technology, so it is most likely that your hard drive and processor were perfectly good when you first got them but now processor is acceptable but your hard drive is drastically out of date with only a small amount of storage and a slow speed! But this is where external hard drives come in, they are great because you can take them around with you to use in your personal computer, work computer, and your friends computer and now that they are so much smaller than before you can just put them in your pocket.
So why do you need a hard drive? I fully understand that I am probably the worst case scenario, I have a old Mac with a tiny amount of SSD (solid state drive(no moving parts)) storage and I am a photographer and video editor. In total I have 500GB disk for back up, 2 separate 1TB G-Drive hard drives for editing, and a LaCie Fuel 2TB hard drive for normal use and to store my 200GB photo library upon. So back to the question why do you need one? Well all hard drives can fail, not just the mechanical ones but also the SSD ones, this means that your whole computer can suddenly die and even a hard drive replacement will not help you get that data back. You might also want to give documents to colleagues, friends or family and although there are alternative ways such as AirDrop these are fairly slow and unreliable and they are terrible for cross compatibility.
There are 3 main hard drives that exist: SSD these are the newest, and are highly compact but the biggest drawback is the price as it will cost roughly 4 times more than a standard hard drive. Regular HDD this is a standard run of the mill one this is the same technology we have seen for the last 20 odd years, but you can get some HDD drives that outpace a SSD drive as some regular drives can reach speeds of 230 megabytes per second, and the highest speed for a SSD drive is 600 megabytes per second, but obviously these speeds are not apparent in all hard drives, and you have to pay big buck to get something that can reach these speeds. Lastly there is raid which is basically sticking two identical hard drives together and they work together to effectively retrieve and write data 2x faster (it is a bit more complex than that).

So down to business, my personal favorite hard drives.
Value For Money


Read Speed= 50 megabytes per second. Size= 2TB. Price Per 10 GB=£0.65. Unique Feature= Very good capacity to price ratio.
This is a great option for those who demand storage at a low price without the frills. The speed is enough to transfer a film in under a minute.  

Speed And Durability


Read Speed= 387 megabytes per second. Size= 0.5TB. Price Per 10 GB=£2.13. Unique Feature= Thunderbolt allows other ports to be used and also high transfer speeds, also you can drop it off of the Empire State Building and it will probably still work.
Overall this is a nice all rounder, but its a bit large, never the less it is very reliable and is great for those on the go and need reliability.

Convenience And Durability


Read Speed= 150 megabytes per second. Size= 64GB. Price Per 10 GB=£8.28. Unique Feature= The USB stick is rated to be drop proof up to a unbelievable 100 meters. 

Usability and Connection.


Read Speed= 15 megabytes per second. Size= 0.2TB. Price Per 10 GB=£4.50. Unique Feature= The small form factor and wireless link make this ideal for a traveler with limited mobile storage space.
Overall this is more than just a USB stick offering features such as a high capacity and wireless transfer, but it does have the disadvantage of being slow for USB transfer.

Design and Connectivity.


Read Speed= 60 megabytes per second. Size= 0.5TB. Price Per 10 GB=£1.16. Unique Feature= Elegant design.

Combined Speed Durability And Connectivity (Personal Hard-Drive).


Read Speed= 75 megabytes per second. Size= 2TB. Price Per 10 GB=£0.87. Unique Feature= Fast whilst hard wired, long battery life.
This is my hard-drive of choice this is because of its durability great design which is inspired by a fuel can, fast data speeds which are sufficient for video editing as well as the ease of use.

Speed


Read Speed= 450 megabytes per second. Size= 1TB. Price Per 10 GB=£3.12. Unique Feature= Compact size.
After fiddling around with this micro hard drive I cannot fault it, it is everything you need from a hard drive, as it is fast and compact, so compact that it keeps getting lost!

Now I will move onto desktop hard drives, these are usually much cheaper and faster but are obviously not transportable, but if you keep your work in one place this may not be a issue for you.

Price And Speed


Read Speed= 620 megabytes per second. Size= 5TB. Price Per 10 GB=£0.22. Unique Feature= Very high speed high capacity and low price.
Now I know some amateur film makers and they swear by these, they are cheap reliable and very good for those on a budget.

Speed And Size


Read Speed= 700 megabytes per second. Size= 1TB. Price Per 10 GB=£0.33. Unique Feature= Overall speed and reliability. 
Now in terms of performance this hard drive is not that much better in terms of speed and capacity than the Seagate alternative, but this is user serviceable and offers RAID configuration.

Connectivity And Convenience.


Size= 4TB. Price Per 10 GB=£0.59. Unique Feature= Your own damn server!
This drive can be basically configured to  be used as a personal cloud or can be networked to store files for a office upon, or with a Mac you can sett it up to automatically create a backup of your whole system.


I hope that you found this list to be good, if you have any recommendations just leave a comment below and I will be sure to check it out.