The Best Portable and Desktop SSDs for Mac and iPad

Most people buy SSD speed and capacity exactly backwards. They spend extra on a blazing Thunderbolt drive to hold Time Machine backups that get written in the background and read roughly once a year, then save twenty euros on a slow USB stick for the 4K footage they scrub through every single evening. The fast drive sits there being patient; the slow one makes them wait. An external SSD is one of the few Apple-adjacent purchases where a little knowledge saves real money, because the number printed on the box and the number your Mac can actually use are frequently not the same thing.

Two questions decide the whole purchase: how fast does the data need to move, and how much of it is there. Get those straight and the drive picks itself. Here’s the decision on one screen, then the reasoning behind each fork.

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The two numbers that actually matter

Forget the marketing for a second. An external SSD has an interface (the cable and port standard, which sets the ceiling) and a sustained speed (how fast it really moves data once the cache runs out). People fixate on the first headline figure and ignore the second, which is where cheap drives quietly fall apart on a long copy.

The interface tiers you’ll meet are simple enough. Plain USB at 10 gigabit per second tops out around 1000 MB per second in the real world, and that is genuinely fast enough for almost everyone — backups, photo libraries, casual 4K editing, moving big folders around. Above that sits Thunderbolt, which on current Macs runs 40 gigabit and gives you real-world speeds around 2800 to 3000 MB per second, with the newest Thunderbolt 5 machines and enclosures pushing far beyond that. The thing nobody at the shop tells you is that the jump from USB to Thunderbolt roughly triples the price for a benefit most people will never feel.

The Mac trap with 20-gigabit drives

Here is the single most useful thing in this guide, and it will save someone forty euros. Drives like the Samsung T9 and Crucial X10 Pro are advertised at around 2000 MB per second using a standard called USB 20-gigabit. Apple Silicon Macs do not support that standard. Plug one of those drives into any modern MacBook or Mac mini and it runs at the slower 10-gigabit speed, around 1000 MB per second — exactly the same as a cheaper drive. You paid for headroom your Mac physically cannot reach. If you want to beat 1000 MB per second on a Mac, the only honest route is Thunderbolt, full stop. The 20-gigabit drives make sense on a Windows PC; on a Mac they are money lit gently on fire.

iPad owners, read the port before you buy

The iPad situation catches people out badly. An iPad Pro with the M4 chip has a Thunderbolt and USB 4 port, so it will happily drive a fast external SSD and record ProRes video straight to it. An iPad Air has a normal 10-gigabit USB-C port, which is plenty. But the base iPad has a USB-C port that runs at USB 2.0 speeds — around 40 MB per second, which is not a typo and is genuinely slow. Hang a 2800 MB-per-second Thunderbolt drive off a base iPad and it will crawl. So match the drive to the device: a serious SSD belongs on an iPad Pro, while the base iPad just wants a cheap, reliable drive for the occasional file transfer.

Capacities: buy for the job, not the headline

Capacity is where you should actually spend, because running out of space is a far more common regret than running out of speed. My rough rules:

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• Time Machine wants at least twice the size of the drive you’re backing up, ideally three times, so it can keep a deep history of versions. Backing up a 1TB Mac? Buy a 2TB or 4TB drive and never think about it again.
• Photo libraries balloon quietly. If your Photos library lives on the drive, size up a tier from whatever feels right today.
• Video eats space like nothing else. A single hour of ProRes can run into hundreds of gigabytes, so 4K editors should start at 2TB and treat 4TB as normal.

Time Machine versus media: genuinely two different drives

These two jobs pull in opposite directions, and trying to serve both with one drive is how people overspend. A Time Machine drive is a boring, slow, capacious workhorse — speed is irrelevant because backups run quietly in the background, so buy the cheapest big drive from a name you trust and leave it plugged in. A media drive for editing is the opposite: you want the speed because you feel every second of lag scrubbing a timeline, and capacity is secondary to bandwidth. Keep them separate. The cheap big drive guards your past; the fast drive carries your work.

Here’s how the popular options actually shake out on a Mac, prices around what you’ll pay for a 2TB model.

Brands I trust, and one cautionary tale

For sealed portable drives, Samsung and Crucial are the safe, dull choices I recommend most — consistent speeds, good warranties, and they don’t do anything weird. The Samsung T7 Shield in particular is the drive I hand to friends who just want something that works and survives a drop onto a wooden floor.

For Thunderbolt, OWC is the brand I lean on, especially their enclosures, because they understand Macs and their drives don’t overheat into a throttled mess the way some cheaper Thunderbolt sticks do. LaCie makes lovely rugged orange drives that pros like, but you pay a real premium for the design and the brand, so I only buy them when someone else is paying.

And one warning earned the hard way across the community: a few years back a well-known line of SanDisk Extreme portable drives became infamous for losing data on certain batches. SanDisk has moved on, but the lesson stands — a backup drive’s only job is to be trustworthy, so I steer people toward the brands with boring, spotless reputations rather than whatever is cheapest this week.

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The cheapest route nobody mentions

If you’re even slightly handy, the best value in storage is to buy a bare NVMe SSD and a separate enclosure, then assemble them in about ninety seconds with no tools. A blank 2TB or 4TB NVMe stick plus a quality USB or Thunderbolt enclosure routinely costs less per terabyte than a sealed drive, and you can replace either half later. For Thunderbolt, an OWC or Acasis enclosure with a decent NVMe drive gets you genuine 2800 MB-per-second performance for noticeably less than a branded Thunderbolt drive. It is the single biggest way to dodge the storage tax, internal or external.

Honest picks, by what you’re doing

• Just need backups. Samsung T5 EVO or any big, cheap USB drive, sized at two to three times your Mac. Speed does not matter here; capacity and reliability do.
• Photographer with a growing library. Crucial X9 Pro or Samsung T7 Shield, 2TB or 4TB, USB 10-gigabit. Fast enough to edit RAW files straight off the drive, cheap enough to own two.
• Casual 4K video. Same 10-gigabit USB drive. You do not need Thunderbolt to cut holiday footage.
• ProRes and pro timelines. A real Thunderbolt drive — OWC Express, or a DIY enclosure with a good NVMe stick. This is the one audience that feels every megabyte per second.
• iPad Pro creator. A Thunderbolt or fast USB drive to record and edit on the go. Match it to the Pro’s port, not the base iPad’s.

If you remember one thing, make it this: buy capacity generously and speed honestly. Almost everyone is best served by a roomy 10-gigabit USB drive from Samsung or Crucial at around 1000 MB per second, sized two tiers bigger than feels necessary, because you will fill it faster than you think and you will never once wish your Time Machine backup finished a second sooner. Pay the Thunderbolt premium only if you genuinely cut ProRes or juggle huge timelines for a living, and if you do, build your own with an enclosure and save the difference. The fast, expensive drive is a tool for a specific job; the big, sensible drive is the one that quietly protects everything you’d hate to lose.