Best external hard drive for a Mac Mini. Also best external hard drive for an iMac.

Hi, jpstephe, I don’t know exactly what year(s) of manufacture + model numbers are for your iMac or your Mac Mini, but an SSD is a pretty good fast bet for external storage… it’s faster for writing , reading and accessing data then a conventional “spinning”

card drive, even though hard drives are doing their best, SSD’s beats them in terms of overall speed… the only downside to SSD’s ( solid state drives) is the cost per GB of storage vs a conventional hard drive , which will pretty much be cheaper , the convention hard drive that is, as the storage capacity/size of an SSD increases, past a certain point, the cost goes WAY up… if you can live with that/don’t mind that, then that’s the way to go, that’s my recommendation, anyways, see this OWC/Macsales link for what’s out there on the market for that: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-storage/ssd…OWC/macsales is a known good + reliable+ reputable vendor…4TB would run you about $400 USD-ish, and that’s for an external

SSD… after that, the sky’s almost the limit ( up to 30 TB, IF your wallet/credit card/budget CAN handle it…

John B

While external SSDs are fast, whether you need the speed or not depends on what you are using the external drives for.

If it is just to add additional space for video and/or music libraries and just other common data, you really do not need the speed of SSDs. Even streaming 4K video can easily be handled by a spinning HDD. Same is true for backup or just archival storage. You can get much larger storage and cheaper.

If you are doing serious video editing and the files reside on an external drive, then an SSD may be needed.

+1👍

I’m happy with my Toshes, can recommend: https://storage.toshiba.com/consumer-hdd/external