What Size External Hard Drive For Macbook Pro

I sometimes get caught up in the tech specs, thinking that a tiny performance advantage really matters: For most people, the small differences between Solid State Drive (SSD) models just isn't worth quibbling over. In fact, you're more likely to gain more work 'performance' if you bring an apple to your desk so you don't have to leave your workspace just to grab a snack.

The more important performance gain is simply ditching your old and slow traditional hard disk drive found in earlier Apple MacBook Pros (pre-Retina) by moving to an SSD.

The Big Question: Is the Price Right for the Storage Space You Need?

5 Best External Hard Drives for MacBook Pro (as of February, 2021): 1. Samsung T5 MU-PA1T0B/AM External Hard Drives for MacBook Pro – Editor's Choice Review Samsung is one of the clear leaders in hard drive technology, whether external or not, and continues to dominate the market with their T5 models. Your system has a SATA II (3 Gb/s) interface which can support any SATA I or II HD. Today you can find very large SATA drives (4TB). But the physical size of the drive must fit within your system. Your system supports 2.5' drive that is 9.5mm in height.

The Crucial BX200 offers great speed and value for an SSD drive.

The cost of SSD storage has finally dropped low enough to make it a reasonable buy for many MacBook Pro owners. Of course, the newer MacBook Pros with Retina Displays all include solid-state flash-based storage, but there's millions of MacBooks and MacBook Pros that still contain powerful processors that are only hampered by slow spinning hard drives. If you use an older MacBook Pro, you can give yourself a nice upgrade with an SSD — plus extend the life of your investment.

1. The non retina models (mid 2012) use standard 2.5' SATA drives (9mm stock, 7mm and 12.5mm will fit) and are easily upgradable to a larger size or an SSD. The retina models are basically not.
2. Currently, you can buy an 8 TB external drive for less than $150, whereas that amount of money will only buy you a 500 GB SSD.
3. LaCie Mobile Drive 5TB External Hard Drive USB. LaCie 500GB Mobile SSD High‑Performance External SSD USB-C USB 3.0 - Previous Gallery Image. LaCie 500GB Mobile SSD High‑Performance External.

To start your upgrade process, first you need to determine how much storage you really need right now . . . and what you'll need in the next year or so.

If you don't know how much you're using, you can always launch the Apple Disk Utility app from within the Utilities folder in your applications folder. Select your drive in the upper left and look at the bottom of the app window to learn the size of your drive and how much space you have available. If you have a 500 GB hard drive and you're only using 180 GB, you can likely get away with a 250 GB SSD. If you're using more than 300 GB — lots of photos and videos, for instance — you'll have to buy a 480 GB or larger SSD.

How Fast Is Fast?

Typically, the speed at which your Mac can read data from an SSD will be somewhere around 5x as fast as a traditional hard drive. And the speed at which your Mac can write data to the SSD? At least 2x as fast.What this really means for you is that apps will open and launch with just a single bounce on the dock. You'll rarely see the spinning beach ball mouse icon, making your Mac feel as if it's thinking faster. Apps like iPhoto will feel snappier as you open up events and edit photos. Mail will still download at the speeds offered by your WiFi, but interaction will improve. Your MacBook will wake from sleep faster, plus it'll reboot or launch cold in 15-20 seconds instead of a minute or longer.In short, you'll likely enjoy using your older MacBook or MacBook Pro much more — and if you're like me, you'll wonder why it took you so long to upgrade to an SSD.

Which SSD Should You Buy?

Some SSDs are faster than others, but don't worry about it too much: Figure out how much storage you need and then buy a decent SSD drive that is a SATA III (6 Gbits/s) model at price that matches your budget — the prices of older generation SSD drives slowly drop over time while newer (slightly faster SSD drives with newer encryption) start off at higher prices. I recommend simply picking one of two brands — Crucial or Samsung — that boast consistently good quality and user reviews for Mac owners.

Personally, I'm a fan of the Crucial M500 line because of its outstanding price-to-quality ratio.

Here are three can't-go-wrong options available from Amazon.com:

• Crucial BX200 — 240 GB, 480 GB, or 960 GB
• Crucial MX200 — 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB
• Samsung 850 EVO — 120 GB, 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB or 2 TB

One more thing — when you go to install your SSD, you'll need some tiny screwdrivers. If you're lucky, you can use a cheap set, but if you find a stubborn screw, you'll wish you spent five or six dollars extra for one of these:

How to Upgrade SSD on MacBook Pro and Air

If you're looking for a bit more detail on the upgrade process, check out these guides:

What About Using Your SDXC Card Slot for More Mac Storage?

If you want more on-board, nearly built-in storage — but don't want to actually remove your existing hard drive — you have two good options, both of which are tiny flash-based drives in the shape of camera memory cards. They plug into the SDXC card slot on your MacBook Pro, and they work with all MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros that have SDXC card slots.

The TarDisk Pear system is a tiny drive that you can combine with your built-in drive to create a single 'fused' storage system on your MacBook Air or Pro.

For all intents and purposes, the Transcend JetDrive Liteacts like a little USB thumb drive — but it fits flush into the SDXC card slot instead and appears on your Mac like an external drive that is always on, always available. It appears as a separate storage option to your Mac's operating system. Quite handy.

The TarDisk Pear system, on the other hand, also uses the SDXC card slot but it combines with your built-in storage to form a single 'fused' drive. If you want a near-permanent — but easy storage solution for your MacBook Air or Pro — the TarDisk Pear system might be your best bet.

Of course, if you use your SDXC card slot for loading photos, you can pick up a small USB-based card reader like the Kingston Digital MobileLite G4 Card Reader to easily load photos and video off of your SD camera cards through a USB port.

Get a data lifeguard for Mac

Most of the time, when you connect an external hard drive to your Mac's USB port, you soon see it mount on the desktop. Apple likes to ensure these are easy to find, so they also appear in the Finder in the left-hand column under Devices, since Mac's treat them the same way as another computer.

However, sometimes, an external hard drive doesn't show up. It's annoying, especially when you need to transfer something right then. And besides, there can be a risk that data on the external USB pen, hard, or flash drive is corrupt, which means you can't transfer what you need between devices at all.

Corrupt data can be one reason your Mac won't recognize an external drive, but there are other reasons too. Let's take a look why this is happening and how you can get an external drive to appear on your Mac and get recover data to access to your documents.

How to fix an external disk drive that won't show up on a Mac

https://truenfil525.weebly.com/foxit-reader-download-free-full-version.html. Why an external disk drive is not showing up? There could be a few reasons why a USB flash drive isn't making an appearance.

Open an External Drive Not Showing on Mac

Get a huge set of top utilities for troubleshooting external hard drives not mounting on a Mac

Start with the basics:

1. Check whether the drive is properly plugged in. It sounds obvious, but since this relies on a wire - either a USB cable or HDMI cable - if it's not connected properly then it won't appear on your desktop.
2. Faulty cable. Assuming it's plugged in correctly, not wobbly or loose, the cable could be at fault. Try connecting the same device with a different cable.
3. Damaged USB or flash drive port. It could be a hardware issue with the Mac. If you've got another port, try connecting the device to that one.
4. Reboot your Mac. Sometimes, if a USB disk won't boot, the cause is macOS issue. Hopefully, some data damage that can be fixed by restarting. Choose the Apple menu > Restart. Or press and hold the power button and, when a dialog box appears, click the Restart or press R. Restarting your Mac essentially clears your macOS's memory and starts it up fresh.
5. Incorrectly formatted drive. Not every external drive is optimized for Macs. It could be that you are trying to connect something only fit to interact with Windows devices. If you've got a PC or laptop, it's worth connecting and seeing if you can access the files through another device. The best way to look for an incorrectly formatted drive is to go to
   Apple (in the top toolbar menu) > About This Mac > Storage.
   See if the external drive shows up here. For more information, go to the same menu option, then select System Report.
6. Mac not formatted to display external drives on the desktop. It could be that your Mac already recognizes the device, but just isn't showing its icon on the desktop screen. Even if that is the case, the drive will still appear in the left-hand column of the Finder menu under Devices. You should be able to access your drive that way, and, in the Finder menu under Preferences > General, you can check External Drives to ensure that from now on it shows up on your desktop too.
7. Reset NVRAM. To do this, shut down or restart your Mac, switch it back on and immediately press these four keys together for at least 20 seconds: Option, Command, P, and R. It should look as though your Mac has started again; if it has, release the keys when you hear the second startup chime. Hopefully, the hard drive has shown up now.
8. Check Apple's Disk Utility to see if an external drive is showing up. Disk Utility is within System Preferences, or you can find it using Spotlight. If it is visible, then click the option to Mount, which should make it visible on the desktop and in the External Drives option in the Finder menu.

Unfortunately, if none of those options has worked and the external drive still isn't visible, then it could have crashed, or be well and truly broken. But there might still be a way you can recover the data on the external drive.

How to show connected devices in Finder

1. Go to the Finder menu and select Preferences (Cmd+comma).
2. From General tab tick External disks to ensure that from now on it shows on the desktop.

In the Sidebar tab you can choose which folders and devices will be shown in the left-hand column of the Finder window.

How to add cloud storages to Finder

You can also mount cloud storage as local drive on your Mac. By connecting Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon to your computer, you get more space for securely accessing and sharing files. For your ease, add cloud drives to Finder with CloudMounter app, so that you keep them close at hand. You can read detailed instructions on managing cloud storage as local drives here.

Repair the failed external drives with First Aid

If your drive is having problems, you can try to fix them yourself with First Aid and therefore get access to your files. First Aid tool will check the disk for errors and then attempt a repair as needed. It helps to verify and repair a range of issues related to startup HD and external drive problems. If you are able to fix the hard drive or SSD in your Mac (or an external drive) using Disk Utility you will hopefully be able to recover your files.

To run Fist Aid on an external hard drive:

1. Open Disk Utility. You can searching for it using Spotlight Search or via Finder > Application > Utility
2. Check on your external hard drive, click the First Aid tab and select Run to start running diagnostics.

If First Aid successful in fixing errors, the external drive should be available to mount. If the utility unable to repair issues, your drive truly is broken or formatted using a file system that the Mac cannot read - in this way we suggest you follow the next steps to recover data from a damaged disk drive.

How to recover data from a crashed drive

Thankfully, there is an app for that. Disk Drill is the world's premier data recovery software for Mac OS X. Powerful enough to retrieve long-lost, mistakenly deleted files from Macs, external hard drives and USB drives and camera cards.

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An easy way to recover lost files on an external hard drive

Providing you already have Disk Drill Pro version, which you can get automatically by downloading from Setapp:

What Size External Hard Drive For Macbook Pro 2020

1. Connect your drive to the Mac.
2. Quit all other applications on the Mac, especially those that may be trying to access the external drive (e.g. iPhoto, Words)
3. Launch Disk Drill.
4. Click on the external drive that you are trying to recover files from. If it has partitions, you will see all of them. If, however, you still don't see any volume to the external drive then you may need to try some of the steps above again or read the Disk Drill Scanning FAQs.
5. To avoid the external drive being accessed during the recovery process, click Extras next to the drive or drive partition or file, then select Remount Volume As Read Only. A padlock will appear, protecting the drive during the process.
6. Now click Rebuild (or Recover) next to the file(s) you are trying to recover. Once the scan is finished - it may take some time if the files are large - a list of files will appeal.
7. Next, click Mount Found Items as Disk button on the bottom-left below the scan results.
8. Disk Drill 'strongly suggest saving the files to a different drive than the one you are trying to recover files from. Saving to the same drive substantially lowers your chances of recovery.'
9. A drive icon will appear, which once you double click will give you the option to open the files as you would do before they were lost. Drag them to another location, such as your desktop or a folder on your Mac.
10. Open the files to ensure they have been recovered properly and safely eject the external drive.

Disk Drill does have other ways to recover lost files but assuming there aren't complications, this method is the most effective. Disk Drill Pro recovery app is available from Setapp, along with dozens of Mac apps that will make your life easier. Never have to worry about a crashed or corrupted external drive again.

A few more tips on getting your files back

1. Macs and third-party apps that look after Macs, such as Disk Drill and iStat Menus come with a S.M.A.R.T. (also known as Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) status monitor. If a SMART check reports errors, then it could mean the hard drive is at risk of failing completely. Within Disk Utility and Disk Drill, there are several solutions for this: Repair Disk Permissions and Repair Disk. If neither work, it's recommended that you backup all of the data from the disk, erase, then run a SMART check again. The external hard drive should show up as Verified.
2. Partitions can get lost within hard drives, temporarily hiding all of the information contained within. Disk Drill can help to identify and restore this information.
3. Within Disk Drill, you can restore data when a hard drive is damaged or add formatting, which is also something Disk Utility can help with.
4. CleanMyMac, another useful app available from Setapp, can help you identify external hard drive errors and repair them. It is an essential tool worth trying when you're having external hard drive difficulties.

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Alternative ways to recover data from an external hard drive

Reset the System Management Controller (SMC) if your Mac shuts down when you plug in an external hard drive. Then use a different port to connect the external hard drive. If you've got a battery that you can't remove:

• Shut down and unplug the power adapter
• Press Shift-Control-Option and the power button at the same time. Do this for 10 seconds
• Release all keys
• Plug the power adapter back in and switch your Mac back on

For Macs with removable batteries, you need to switch them off, remove the battery, then press and hold the power button for 5 seconds. After that, put the battery back in, plug in the power adapter and switch the power on again.

What's your file format? One reason your Mac isn't recognizing the hard drive is the file format. Windows uses NTFS file formats, while Macs, up until the introduction of Sierra, have used HFS+. Now, Apple has introduced the Apple File System (APFS) for newer operating systems. It is possible to format a hard drive so it can be read on Mac and Windows computers, providing you format using exFAT. However, if you're having problems accessing the files and the issue is due to formatting, you will need to connect it to a device it can be read on, and then format the files correctly for the computer you are going to use it on next.

How to make Ext2/Ext3 drives readable on Mac

The common issue is Ext2- and Ext3-formatted drives are not readable on macOS. There are two ways to access such external drives on your Mac – via Linux OS or FUSE system. The easiest would be installing Linux to a secondary drive or virtual machine.

What Size External Hard Drive For Macbook Problems

If you go with Linux installation, dual boot your Mac with Linux on another drive and use FAT32 as a transfer intermediary. If you don't have a drive to install Linux to, use virtual machine as an interface for it. Transferring can be done the same way – with FAT32, or via network.

Another option for reading Ext2/Ext3 disks is mounting disk with Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE). Basically, it works as an extra interface enabling file system access via specially installed modules. Here's how to mount drives with FUSE:

1. Install FUSE for macOS or MacFUSE as well as fuse-ext2 module.
2. Use the following Terminal command to enable Disk Utility's debug menu and see all partitions: defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
3. Attach your Ext2/Ext3 drive and locate the device name via Disk Utility.
4. In your user account, create a folder to be used as a mount point.
5. Use the following Terminal command to mount the drive as read-only: fuse-ext2 /dev/disk2s2 /Volumes/mountpoint
6. For write support, use the command: fuse-ext2 -o force /dev/disk2s2 /Volumes/mountpoint

And that's not the only case where Terminal helps you access external drive.

Employ the handy all-powerful Terminal, which always comes forward with solutions for difficult problems. Especially if System Information does recognize the USB or hard drive, but continues to hide it from you, disconnect the drive and try to find it using the Terminal, which you can find in Applications > Utilities.

• Once in the Terminal, type in the command diskutil list
• A list with information about volumes and drives should appear
• Look for a section labelled /dev/disk_ (external, physical)
• Make a note of the whole line after the word disk
• Now put the following command into the Terminal diskutil info disk followed by the number or digits assigned to that disk
• Now you should see detailed information about the drive, therefore confirming that your Mac can and does recognize it
• Eject using the Terminal by entering the command diskutil eject disk followed by the number or digits assigned to that disk
• Physically remove the disk from you Mac
• Plug it back in and your Mac should recognize it

Windows new version download. Console is also reliable when it comes to solving tricky problems, although it isn't always that easy to use. You can find Console under Applications > Utilities > Console. Console shows if an external drive or any error is detected under the Errors and Faults tab. If no errors show up, then the problem is not caused by the device.

To sum up, there are lots of potential solutions for a Mac not reading an external hard drive. If we were to pick one, Disk Drill seems to be the most well-rounded, offering plenty of customizations and power in an easy-to-use interface. Disk Drill Pro recovery app is available via Setapp, along with 150+ Mac apps that strive to make your life much much easier. At the very least, you'll never have to worry about a crashed or corrupted external drive ever again.

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

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What Size External Hard Drive For Macbook Program