Apple charges a ton for storage upgrades on Macs. Worse, you cannot extend the built-in storage after buying the Mac. Thankfully, smarter solutions exist, as long as you don’t mind plugging an external disk into your Mac.
Here’s a breakdown of the best ways to expand your Mac’s storage, along with ideal solutions based on particular needs.
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Easily upgrade your Mac’s storage
Macs are fast, gorgeous, efficient … and wildly overpriced when it comes to storage. Apple charges a premium to upgrade your Mac storage (think $200 just to double the SSD size of an M4 MacBook Pro from 512GB to 1TB). And the company offers zero options to upgrade later.
However, with a good external storage solution, you can add terabytes of fast, reliable storage to your Mac for less than Cupertino wants for a few hundred extra gigabytes. In fact, if you juggle between multiple Macs, this solution becomes even more attractive, especially if you frequently play around with large video files and documents.
Cult of Mac tested the best external storage solutions — from budget-friendly hard drives to blisteringly fast Thunderbolt SSDs — to help you find the right pick based on your personal needs, workflow and wallet.
Table of contents: Easily upgrade your Mac’s storage
- External HDDs: The cheapest way to add more storage
- USB-C SSDs: Midrange option with plenty of upsides
- Thunderbolt SSDs and enclosures: The fastest, but priciest, Mac storage upgrade
External HDDs: The cheapest way to add more storage
Want a lot of storage on a budget for storing your movie library and years of photos? Get an external hard drive if you want the most bang for your buck. Most 4TB or 5TB external drives retail for between $100 and $120.
The problem with this approach to upgrading your Mac storage? External hard drives are slow. I would only recommend them for backup and data archiving purposes. I use a 1TB external hard drive to back up my entire Google Photos library once a month. Plus, I have a Western Digital 4TB external hard disk permanently connected to my Mac mini for storing all my movies, videos and other content.
Ideally, I’d recommend choosing an external hard drive with drop protection, such as those from LaCie. Without that ruggedization, a single accidental drop could put your data at serious risk.
This rough little solid-state drive is USB 3.0/2.0 compatible, shock/dust/rain-resistant and designed for Macs and PCs. Comes in orange or gray colors.
- Affordable
- Huge capacity
- Comes with free Adobe software membership
- Not the fastest data transfer
- Adobe software membership is only 1 month
External USB-C SSDs: Midrange option with plenty of upsides
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac
A USB-C external solid state drive provides the most affordable way to upgrade your Mac’s storage without breaking the bank. Unlike external hard drives, the latest SSDs are portable and easy to carry around. More importantly, they are fast when it comes to data transfer — really fast. Most external SSDs can reach speeds between 650 MB/s and 850 MB/s. That’s more than enough to run your favorite Mac apps and store your frequently accessed data.
I use a 1TB Samsung T7 SSD with my Mac mini to edit all my GoPro videos. With only 512GB of internal storage, my Mac fills up fast, making the external drive a lifesaver. Plus, I can plug the SSD into my MacBook Pro and pick up editing right where I left off. Since I don’t edit 6K, 8K or 10-bit videos, this solution works fine.
I also sync my Dropbox and Google Drive folders to this external storage, saving space on the Mac mini.
Fast, portable and affordable
The best part about these external SSDs? They offer a fast, portable storage solution on a budget. A 1TB Samsung T9 SSD retails for around $175, with a 2TB model coming in at $215. This model even supports faster read/write speeds of up to 2,000 MB/s, though you’ll be limited by your Mac’s 10Gbps USB-C port.
Alternatively, consider the Samsung T7 SSD. It’s more affordable, with the 2TB model available for just $140. While it’s not as rugged as the T9 and offers slightly slower speeds, it still delivers great value for everyday use.
While external USB-C SSDs are already portable, you can consider the Kingston XS1000 and XS2000 for even more portability.
Check out other options in our buying guide: Best external SSDs for Mac or iPad in 2024.
The Samsung T9 solid-state drive is small enough and tough enough to go almost anywhere. Connect it to your Mac, iPad or even iPhone via its USB-C port to transfer data at up to 10Gb/s. Available in a range of capacities from 1TB to 4TB.
- Small and portable
- Fast USB-C connectivity
- Works with all your computers
- Not Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt SSDs and enclosures: The fastest, but priciest, Mac storage upgrade
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Want more space on your Mac without giving up on performance? Consider buying a Thunderbolt SSD. They use NVMe (short for “Non-Volatile Memory Express”) drives and deliver read and write speeds that match your Mac’s internal SSD. In fact, if you own an entry-level Mac with 256GB of storage, a Thunderbolt SSD will exceed its speeds. Most Thunderbolt 4 drives typically achieve speeds of 2,700 MB/s or higher, with some capable of reaching peak speeds higher than 5,100 MB/s.
With such speeds, you can directly edit 8K RAW, ProRes and other heavy codecs off the external Thunderbolt SSD. That’s not it. Newer NVMe drives can hit peak speeds of more than 7 GB/s, saturating the Thunderbolt 4’s 40Gbps bandwidth. If you desire even more speed and don’t mind splurging, get a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure with one of the newer NVMe drives from Samsung or Western Digital. These can hit insanely high 10GB/s speeds.
Thunderbolt 4 drive or NVMe Thunderbolt enclosure?
To achieve this sort of speedy Mac storage upgrade, you can either buy an external Thunderbolt 4 drive or an NVMe Thunderbolt enclosure. With the latter, you must buy an NVMe drive yourself. This gives you the flexibility to increase the drive’s storage capacity later if needed. However, you must make sure to buy an enclosure that specifically says Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4.
Thunderbolt SSDs pack impressive speed into a form factor that’s just slightly larger than USB-C SSDs. They come with a heatsink or other passive cooling solution for heat dissipation. Thanks to USB-C compatibility, Thunderbolt SSDs work with a wide variety of PCs. When you plug them into a non-Thunderbolt USB-C port, their speeds drop to 10Gbps or less.
You can find quality Thunderbolt enclosures for between $100 and $120, and a 1TB NVMe drive typically costs about $80. External Thunderbolt SSDs typically cost around $200. This makes them the most expensive solution of the lot, albeit still cheaper than what Apple wants for a storage upgrade.
Using an NVMe drive and an external enclosure, you can bump your Mac’s storage to as much as 8TB for less $1,000. The best part? You can purchase another external Thunderbolt SSD to instantly double your Mac’s storage.
The OWC Express 1M2 NVMe Thunderbolt enclosure stands out for delivering real-world speeds of over 3,100MB/s. It works with a wide range of M.2 SSDs in 2230, 2242, and 2280 sizes. It is also backward compatible with USB-C.
- Aluminum heat sink for heat dissipation
- Supports full Thunderbolt 4 speeds with compatible drives
- Two-year warranty
- Not as portable as external USB-C SSDs
If you need access to terabytes of superfast storage, get the OWC ThunderBay 4 enclosure. You give up portability with this solution, but it will give you access to up to 96TB(!) of storage. The enclosure itself does not come with any drives. Instead, you must buy them separately. The enclosure can house up to four SSDs and deliver a sustained speed of 1,500 MB/s over Thunderbolt.
This rock-solid enclosure is great for massive video and photo libraries, Time Machine backups, or as a foolproof RAID array. Supports up to 96TB of storage -- yes, that's terabytes --- and is super easy to set up and upgrade. Never run out of storage again.
- Super high-speed Thunderbolt connectivity
- Solid metal construction
- Simple setup
- Bring your own drives
