And we've seen some great discounts on the Samsung T7, so get in there if you want to save big on one of the best SSDs around.ĭon't want to mess about reformatting a hard drive to use with your Mac? This SanDisk hard drive comes Mac-ready, and you can format it to work with any PC, as well.

The T5 is still widely available, but the T7 is twice as fast, with read/write speeds up to 1,050MB/s and 1,000MB/s. Like the earlier drives in the range, the T7 is compact, lightweight and robust, with a shock-resistant aluminium housing that means it can withstand drops of up to two metres.

We've been impressed with this range of Samsung SSDs ever since our Samsung T3 review years ago. You can install applications onto it, and you could even run an entire alternative operating system off it at full speed if you wanted to. You can load, edit and save 4K video directly on the T7, something that can be painfully slow with a USB hard disk. You can also use password protection if you prefer. The built-in fingerprint scanner backed up with AES 265-bit encryption, and once you set that up, nobody except you will be able to access your files. And the Samsung T7 Touch is a great value option, with the added bonus of fingerprint security (this is the difference from the standard Samsung T7)

They're more expensive, but a lot faster. That's when an SSD is the smart option over an external hard drive. Speed can be of the essence if you have gigabytes of big image or video files and don't want to be stuck watching the progress bar crawl along at a glacial pace.

Best external hard drives for mac cnet