What are the best challenging drive configurations for Macs?

A variety of drive enclosures
There are thousands of external storage cases available on the market. Some are good and some are bad. We have opinions about the best hard drive cases for Mac users. Storage is a problem that persists when purchasing Apple hardware. Upgrades to the internal storage on a Mac or MacBook are expensive, especially if other upgrades are included (check out the latest Mac prices). There are other ways of increasing storage without paying Apple’s storage fees. External drives that plug into your Mac are the easiest way to go. Although portable workstations are convenient, they often only have one drive, so you can’t store large amounts of data. A network-attached device (NAS) is another option, as it can solve storage limitations by holding several drives. You’re then limited by bandwidth as you have to access the drives via a slow network. AppleInsider has curated a selection of drives that solves both the speed and capacity problems. You can use multiple drives simultaneously by connecting directly to your Mac. They are flexible because you can add additional drives manually. You can start with less storage to save money and then add more later. Best all-round external enclosure – OWC ThunderBay 4. The OWC ThunderBay 4, a simple device, allows up to four 20-gigabyte 3.5″ and 2.4″ drives to be stored within its aluminum enclosure. OWC ThunderBay 4 – Best all-round enclosure for external drives. You can mix and match SSDs and hard disks to meet your storage requirements. Access speeds up to 1,527MB/s are sustained when under load. You can also choose from RAID 0, 1, 4 5, and 1+0 options, which allows you to balance speed and capacity while maintaining redundancy. It connects with your Mac via Thunderbolt but also has a second Thunderbolt connector so you can daisy-chain it. This allows you to maximize the Thunderbolt connection’s 40Gbps bandwidth. Buy at AmazonThe enclosure without drives is available for $449.99 on Amazon. Drive configurations at OWC range from 8TB at $979 up to $2,649.99 per 80TB. Sabrent USB 3.0 3.5-inch SATA Docking Station allows you to connect multiple drives to your Mac. It’s a serious piece of storage equipment, an aluminum tower into which you can fit up to ten SATA 6 3.5-inch drives, all of which can be accessed from the Mac. Sabrent USB 3.2 SATA Hard Drive Docking Station – Best high-capacity enclosure. These drives can be installed with no tray, saving you time. They also have independent power switches making them hot-swappable. There are two 120mm fans that cool the enclosure. Buy at AmazonThe enclosure is connected to your Mac via USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C with UASP. This gives it up to 10Gbps bandwidth. There are no hardware RAID options, but you can use software RAID to maximize the number of drives that you can fit into the enclosure. Sabrent’s disk enclosure is available on Amazon for $599.99. Drives are not included. Consider the UGreen USB C Hard Drive Enclosure if you only need to connect a single drive, such as for Time Machine backups or a large-capacity disk. UGreen USB C Hard Drive Enclosure is the best single-drive external enclosure. It’s made of aluminum and should match most Mac models. It’s also compact. It can hold a single 2.5″ SATA SSD and is still portable. It’s a drive enclosure that you insert into. You can choose the amount of space you want to use, and you can do this without using any tools. It connects over USB 3.1 Gen 2 with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable. It supports speeds up to 6Gbps. Amazon: The UGreen USB C Hard Drive Enclosure costs $24.99, making it an easy purchase for anyone who has a spare hard drive. TerraMaster D8 hybrid is the best hybrid external drive enclosure. You can have a lot of drives but if you’re looking for speed and saving money there are few options. TerraMaster D8 Hybrid is a possible solution. TerraMaster D8 Hybrid – Best hybrid external drive enclosureWe reviewed the TerraMaster D8 Hybrid Drive in May. It is an enclosure which can hold eight drives. This enclosure has four trays which can hold up to 24TB SATA drives and four NVMe SSDs. It has a theoretical maximum capacity of 128TB. This allows you to use a combination between fast storage for frequently-accessed data and cheaper, higher-capacity disks for long-term archiving. There are also RAID 0, RAID 1 and 2+6 configurations. Buy at AmazonFor speeds over USB 3.2 Gen 2, you can achieve up to 980MB/s reading and 880MB/s writing speeds for M.2 drives, 560MB/s for SATA SSDs individually, and 1,016MB/s for four SSDs combined. Amazon offers the TerraMaster D8 Hybrid for $299.99. Sabrent USB Type C SATA Dual Bay Hard Drive Docking system is the best device for archival drives access. We admit that this is not a true enclosure, but anyone with a lot of old hard drives can benefit from it. It is for those who have data that they need to access occasionally, but not to keep on a device. Sabrent USB Type C SATA Dual Bay Drive Docking System – Best device for archival drives accessIf you are a data hoarder, you can easily access your drives with the Sabrent USB Type C SATA Dual Bay Drive Docking station. The toaster-like hardware, connected at 5Gbps USB 3,0, can hold up to two 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives, which can be mounted on your Mac and read. Once you’ve accessed the data you need, you can remove the drive from the device and eject the drive before storing it safely. There’s an offline cloning feature that can copy data between drives. Sabrent USB Type C SATA Dual Bay Docking Station, available at B&H Photo and Amazon for $49.99, is also useful if you perform a lot maintenance on drives.