Looking for a good SSD external Drive for 2020 27' Retina 5k iMac

[BababooHi]

I'm new to Macs and I'm looking for advice on an external drive for my iMac. 2020 27" Retina 5K. It currently has a 1TB internal SSD and I use 2TB of cloud storage. I am in the process of copying data from my old PC to this iMac and it includes a lot of photos so I can't really proceed until I get an external drive otherwise I'll fill up the internal drive on this thing rather quickly. The things that are important to me for an external drive are:

1. Solid State (Because I want fast retrieval for pictures that end up on it)
2. At least 2TB to give me some room for future data
3. I'll be using it for time machine also. I'm not sure if that effects how large of a drive I should get.
4. I would like a drive with fast data exchange rates. I feel like it should connect with Thunderbolt in order to help facilitate that. At the very least perhaps it should be USB-C compatible.

Any advice or input would be greatly appreciated and/or recommendations for a good drive.

(Do I really even need this drive to be a SSD or is that unnecessary overkill? It certainly drives up the price)

 

[chscag]

Samsung T7 external portable SSD:

SAMSUNG SSD T7 Portable External Solid State Drive 1TB, Up to USB 3.2 Gen2 + 2mo Adobe CC Photography, Reliable Storage for Gaming, Students, Professionals, (MU-PC1T0T/AM), Black

Transfer in a flash, secure with a touch. Whether you're storing critical business documents, games, or movies, the Portable SSD T7 Touch gives you speed and security in a palm-sized package. Experience the next level of external storage, available in three capacities to suit your needs: 500GB, 1...

www.amazon.com

Amazon also sells a 2TB T7

 

[Fishrrman]

"I'll be using it for time machine also. I'm not sure if that effects how large of a drive I should get."

I would strongly suggest that you DO NOT use the same drive for your tm backup as you do for "general storage" (i.e. photo library).

Use A SEPARATE, DEDICATED DRIVE for your tm backup. Yes, I realize this means purchasing another drive. TM doesn't require speed, so this drive can be platter-based to save $$$.

By doing so, can you now get away with a 1tb external SSD for photo storage?
That too will save you a good amount of $$$.

AND... you'll need A THIRD DRIVE to serve as the backup for your external photo library. You DO NOT want to have all your pics on only one drive -- that drive will someday fail, and the pics will be GONE.

For the photo storage, you don't need "the fastest" SSD setup.
A standard USB3 connection should provide all the speed you need for pics (will give read speeds around 420MBps).

Something like a Samsung t5 will handle this (or a t7, but may be more $$$).
Or...
Get a 2.5" SATA "bare SSD".
Then get an enclosure like this:

SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)

SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)

tinyurl.com

Put the drive into the enclosure and you're ready to go.

I would also recommend that enclosure for your backup drives.
Again, these can be platter-based to save money.

 

[BababooHi]

So I decided to go with...

SanDisk 1TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD - Up to 2000MB/s - USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 - External Solid State Drive - SDSSDE81-1T00-G25​

For an external drive. This gives me a 1TB fast external drive for more storage on the computer for Pics and everything.

Sounds like, based on the advice above, if I want to set up time machine I’ll just get a non-SSD drive to use for that. I’m not overly worried about time machine because I have 2TB iCloud storage which right now is plenty.

But if/when I do want to set up Time Machine on an additional external drive any idea on how big a drive it should be?

 

[ght56]

A few things of note--you still want a backup drive as iCloud backups do not backup everything. Additionally, you will want to back up the SSD if those pictures are not stored elsewhere as SSDs can fail. Finally, while the ExFAT file format allows simultaneous access to Windows and Mac without any additional software, I strongly recommend against using it on your SSD. Instead, use a large flash drive in ExFAT to copy from the Windows computer to the ExFAT flash drive, and then copy from the ExFAT flash drive to the SSD formatted in either HFS+ or APFS. ExFAT is much more prone to corruption issues than AFPS and HFS+.

 

[NativeTxn]

You can buy an enclosure and a card and put one together yourself and then it is upgradeable in the future as prices for larger storage cards continues to decline.

 

[Cassandle]

I’m bumping this rather than starting a new thread as my needs are similar to the OP.

I have a 256GB M1 Mac Mini. I’d like to store my music collection (ripped copies of my CDs) and maybe photos too.

I already have a drive for Time Machine backups (this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00TKFEE5S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1), so just need an SSD for external storage and presumably an HDD for back-up of this drive? Presumably Time Machine will only backup the Mac’s disc, not any external drives too?

Any suggestions?

 

[jz0309]

I’m bumping this rather than starting a new thread as my needs are similar to the OP.

I have a 256GB M1 Mac Mini. I’d like to store my music collection (ripped copies of my CDs) and maybe photos too.

I already have a drive for Time Machine backups (this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00TKFEE5S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1), so just need an SSD for external storage and presumably an HDD for back-up of this drive? Presumably Time Machine will only backup the Mac’s disc, not any external drives too?

Any suggestions?

TM will back up external drives as well, just make sure you drive has the necessary capacity.
As for external, I have all my photos stored on a SD extreme 2 TB, same spec as T7… you might also be ok with a T5 spec one and save some money