Fastest 10TB+ external drive for 2026 MacBook Pro

Hello 👋

I'm not a lot into external drives but the OWC ThunderBlade X12 seems a very fast external drive that supports 10tb+ (up to 192tb) : https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade-x12

vmgore wrote:

I’ve done a compromise. I bought an 8TB SSD drive for regular use but I will also later buy a 16 or 20 TB had disk external drive for long term storage of things I don’t need to access that often.

As HWTech says, "It is not easy or cheap to maintain large amounts of data and to ensure everything is properly backed up."

We have confronted this issue for my daughter's photography business. She delivers products and galleries to clients and only guarantees keeping them for 6 more months, but in practice she never deletes any of them. She stores them in an online (cloud) repository (not iCloud) and also on local disks.

For local storage we assume: all external drive hardware will eventually fail. So the process has to accommodate that. This means drives must always be obtained in pairs (or triplicate) because at least one copy must be made for long term storage. We decided NOT to go the route of a single very large external drive, but rather with many smaller drives, most are 4 or 5 TB in size each and are inexpensive commercial-grade external drives, most mechanical. We have over 50 of these and have seen two fail over the past 12 years, which is a failure rate of about 4% roughly and that's in line with what industry expects from commercial-grade products. Replacing those failed drives is fairly easy and the entire contents can be reproduced from the clone again overnight. A failure of a large (22 TB) drive might be more disruptive and cloning such a drive could tie it up for multiple days.

All of this storage (cloud and local) is a business expense and is classified that way on the tax returns.

vmgore wrote:

I’ve done a compromise. I bought an 8TB SSD drive for regular use but I will also later buy a 16 or 20 TB had disk external drive for long term storage of things I don’t need to access that often.

Make sure you have backups for all those external drives if that data is important to you. Just like you need to have frequent & regular backups of the internal SSD since there are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to the data on the internal SSD of the recent Macs due to all of the hardware, software, and security changes.

And a backup drive(s) should only be used for backups. Do not utilize one drive for both data storage & backups since you put your backups at risk as well as needing yet another drive to backup the "data" portion of the drive.

It is not easy or cheap to maintain large amounts of data and to ensure everything is properly backed up.

I'm pretty sure you can plug a TB3 device into a TB5 Mac, and you'll get the full 40 gbps. I know that SanDisk sells a 22TB TB3 Professional external SSD.....

Edit: oops, strike that, turns out the 22TB version uses 3.5" hard drives. Sorry. The other models in that lineup (2,4 and 8 tB) used SSDs.

Yes unfortunately but it's one of the "fastest" 😅

You may find similar drives for lower prices but a bit slower than that 🙂

For what use(s)?

is this for direct editing of video, and something more mundane?

at the high prices of large SSD drives, you may need to create your own 'tiered' approach.

Time Machine does its backing up at very low priority in the background.

Do not pay extra for a drive that is FAST if its main use will be Time Machine.