best external hard drive for mac thunderbolt

If you connect that disk to Catalina, Time Machine won’t recognize it. Time Machine volumes formatted as APFS will only work with Macs running Big Sur or later. It’s fast, consumes less space, which means more room for backups, has greater resistance to data corruption, and copies cloned or sparse files efficiently. Time Machine backups to APFS are impressive when compared to HFS+. However, you won’t be asked for this option for the already formatted HFS+ disk. An external SSD gives you the best performance over APFS, provided you don’t need to use the drive with other pre-Sierra Macs.Īpple lets you format an external drive and choose APFS for Time Machine on macOS Big Sur. If speed and convenience are your top priorities and cost is not an issue. You can also manage free space on the drives efficiently copy-on-write metadata scheme to improve performance, thereby reducing chances of data corruption and increasing focus on encryption. It makes common operations such as copying files and folders instantaneous. The current Apple File System documentation highlights many improvements over HFS+. As of macOS Mojave, fusion drives and HDDs were also upgraded to APFS. In High Sierra, SSD boot drives were converted to APFS upon installation. The experimental support of APFS was first seen in macOS Sierra. Apple File System (APFS)ĪPFS is Apple’s modern file system, first launched in early 2017 for iOS devices. Let’s take a detailed look at each of them, what they’re used for, and which you should pick for your external drive. If you run into issues while formatting, read our guide on how to unlock your Mac external drive.ĭisk Utility allows you to choose from a variety of file system formats. Type in the disk name you want, then select your preferred option for Format and Partition Scheme. Be sure to choose the device, not the volume or volumes it contains. In the sidebar, select the external storage device. Now choose View > Show All Devices to see the storage device at the top level, then the container, and finally any volumes in the container. In the left panel, you’ll see the listing of internal and external drives separately. For a Mac user, neither of these file systems is desirable. It's likely formatted for Windows (using NTFS) or maximum compatibility (using FAT32).

Once you’ve bought a new external storage drive, connect it to your Mac.

How to Format Your Drive With Disk Utility Let’s look at the best file system formats for your Mac's external drive. With the Disk Utility app, you can easily format the drive, give it a label, or even partition it and create multiple volumes. Once you have it, your first task is to pick a suitable file system for that drive depending on your intended usage. The easiest way to add storage to your Mac is to buy an external hard drive.

Best external hard drive for mac thunderbolt