6 reasons why your new Mac needs a second storage drive

Black Friday season is upon us, and that means it’s a great time to find a bargain or two on one of the best Macs around. Whether you’ve just pulled the trigger or simply have your eye on a new computer, though, there’s one thing you should really consider: pairing it up with a capacious external storage drive.

Why? Well, there are plenty of reasons, from freeing up precious internal space to saving you wads of cash. And with SSD prices getting lower all the time, there’s no need to opt for a slower hard disk drive (HDD). Pick up an external drive and you can elevate your Mac experience, particularly if you don’t travel with your device a lot. Here are six reasons why you should consider getting an external storage drive for your Mac.

Save money

We all know that Apple’s Macs are pricey machines, but there are a few areas where this is starker than with their internal storage. Upgrade a drive in the M5 MacBook Pro from 512GB to 1TB, for example, and you’ll have to pay $200. For a 4TB drive, meanwhile, the upgrade cost is an enormous $1,200. That’s a pricey decision for anyone who wants a built-to-order Mac.

Thankfully, external storage is nowhere near that expensive. A 1TB external SSD can be yours for under $100, while you can snag a 4TB drive for well under $300. There’s no need to pay Apple’s extortionate prices.

Granted, there are some caveats. Apple’s SSDs are incredibly fast and are likely to be much zippier than any external drive you pick up (even if you get an SSD instead of an HDD). There’s also the hassle of having a loose storage device cabled up to your Mac. But for the massive savings you can make on an external drive, that’s often all worth it.

Storing large files and apps

Add a few oversized files and apps to your Mac, and its internal storage can quickly become overloaded. That’s especially true if you opted for one of the smaller storage options, but it can happen to anyone who has used a Mac for long enough and built up a sprawling library of files.

That’s where an external drive can come in handy. Instead of constantly performing organizational gymnastics and deleting old files just to free up a few scraps of space, buy a spacious external storage drive and use that instead. As we saw earlier, it’s much cheaper to purchase an external SSD than to pay for one of Apple’s own internal upgrades, and it has the added benefit that you can take your drive anywhere and connect it to a different Mac and still have access to your files.

You can even install apps on connected drives and use them that way. Just make sure the storage device is connected to your Mac whenever you want to run the app.

Thomas Bergbold

Time Machine backups

Backing up your Mac is incredibly important if you don’t want to lose all your important documents should the worst happen and your Mac dies. But if you’re intimidated by the various options at your disposal and how you actually go about backing up your files, getting an external drive could be the ideal solution.

All you need to do is connect it to your Mac and set it up as a Time Machine drive using our simple instructions, and you’re good to go. Keep it hooked up and your Mac will back up on its own schedule, without you needing to lift a finger.

Considering how affordable spacious external disks can be, that’s a great way to ensure your files are safely protected should your Mac kick the bucket. And for an extra layer of protection, you might want to harness the powers of a cloud backup app to keep your files sequestered offsite. That’ll keep them safe if both your Mac and external drive are taken out of action.

Easy replacements

There was a time when you could open up a Mac and swap out its internal storage. Unfortunately, those days are long gone now, meaning that once you’ve made your choice and bought your Mac, you’re stuck with whatever internal storage capacity you opted for.

That’s not the case when it comes to external disks, however. They’re far easier to chop and change–just connect a different drive up to your Mac and away you go (provided it’s formatted for macOS, that is). If your external drive dies, there’s no need to worry about a costly trip to the Apple Store for a laborious replacement, either, as you merely need to get a cheap replacement drive to step into the breach. That means that substituting an external storage disk isn’t as much of a problem as swapping out a dead or insufficient internal SSD.

Versatility

We’ve alluded to it a little in previous sections, but a key advantage of using a peripheral storage drive is its versatility. You can connect and disconnect it whenever you need, put whatever you want on it, hook it up to a different Mac, format it for Windows and other operating systems, and more.

And when you’re done with your current Mac, you can keep your external drive and use it with whatever device you buy next. It can keep up with your evolving needs, giving it a degree of flexibility that you don’t get if you stick with the drives already inside your Mac. With those, you lose them as soon as you sell or recycle your Mac. Not so with a separate SSD.

Safer beta testing

Software betas are a good way to try out new macOS features before they’re released to the public, but they’re also a good way to render your Mac inoperable if something goes wrong. Betas tend to be full of bugs and glitches, and while many will be fairly harmless, there’s a chance you could encounter one that causes damage and requires you to factory reset your Mac, potentially erasing your files in the process.

Thomas Bergbold

That’s why it’s a great idea to not only back up your Mac, but to install macOS betas to an external disk drive. If you must run beta software, doing so this way creates a degree of separation between your important documents and the beta.

It means that if you run into a serious bug and need to reinstall macOS, you only need to do so on the connected drive, not on your Mac itself. That way, you shouldn’t need to erase your primary disk drive and lose any files stored on there, enabling you to continue testing out the beta without as much of the risk attached to it.