Solid State External Hard Drive For Macbook Air

I used this drive to clone a laptop hard drive to a solid state drive. Worked well.

This cable is used with the external hard drive that backs up my MacBook Pro.

Cost effective cable for migrating my old hard drive to new solid state drive.

Solid state drive worth it.

This mounting kit worked well when converting my iMac from a hard drive to a solid state drive.

I installed the Samsung 250GB Solid State Drive in my Lenovo desk-top computer. I moved Windows and all my application software to the solid state drive and all of my personal files to the internal disc drive. The disc drive is backed by an external disc drive. The resulting system is much faster. The installation went very smooth, although I had the entire system backed up on an external disk drive incase anything went wrong.

This is my first MACBook. It is expensive and can not be upgraded after purchase - two big bummers. But it works flawlessly and has all the speed I was hoping for. I use it to create giant panoramas in Photoshop, starting with as many as 15 exposures. What took as much as 15 minutes to process now takes a few seconds. I have a lot of PSB files, gigantic. They save in less than a minute rather than 20. At home, I operate it clam shell style. I had no problem hooking the MACBook up to larger, calibrated screens, though I had to buy a boatload of converters. One way I could have saved money would have been to have purchased a much smaller solid state drive; maybe one TB. No solid state drive is big enough to hold all my photos. So, purchasing a conventional, inexpensive peripheral drive was necessary anyway. A harddrive that is configured for both PCs and MACS turned out to be the best way to go; though now I have about 3TB of unused solid state drive on the MACBook, a waste of money.

This is my second WD 1 TB drive, and I use them to both store and backup photos from my MacBook Pro (with solid-state storage). Even with lots of RAW files, the transfer rate seems fast. It is small, and easily stored when not in use. There is nothing about this drive that I would change.

For several years I have been using the small Samsung USB-C external drives (almost credit-card sized) -- I used two 500GB and one 1TB drives along with Carbon Copy Cloner and my MacBook Air. That worked well (although the 1TB became corrupted and unusable about 3 months ago) and I would especially back up the drive before any flight and separate the drive from my laptop at TSA. I just upgraded to a (wonderful!) MacBook Pro 14 and attempted a Migration Assistant transfer from the Air using a fresh Samsung backup. I let it run for about 8 hours and it never got past the first Looking for applications and documents... stage. To cut to the chase: I thus ordered this 500GB LaCie drive and did a fresh CCC backup from the MB Air. It took 7 minutes to backup 400GB of data! Using the Samsung with USB-C it would take 13 mins for ~22GB. (See screenshot of CCC logs.) I hooked the LaCie up to the MB Pro and started Migration Assistant. The whole process took ~15 minutes. Previously it would take hours. Sorry for rambling on. TLDR; A wicked fast external drive worth every penny. And Thunderbolt makes a huge difference!

The exact cable I need to connect a 2021 Macbook Air to a Western Digital external drive, before this I had to connect both the laptop and the ext HD to a hub and it was very clumsy. Searched around for this cable and B&H has the best deal!