Once upon a time, Apple made it easy to crack open a Mac, remove a hard drive, and replace it with a new one when the old drive was no longer working, too slow, or of insufficient capacity. Those days are long gone for most Macs, leaving readers to wonder what the best path forward is.
You have effectively three options:
The last option is the most straightforward and works with any Mac. While I’m stretching back years when I bring up FireWire 800, if that’s the fastest connection on your Mac, it’s a better choice than USB 2.0 (800Mbps versus 480Mbps). (However, note that if your Mac has FireWire 800 and not USB 3 and it isn’t an iMac, it likely has an easy drive replacement option.)
External SSDs up to 1TB and external hard disk drives (HDDs) of many terabytes have dropped to highly affordable prices. Match the drive to the interface you have: there’s no sense in buying a high-performance SSD that can deliver 2 GBps (18Gbps) and plugging it into USB 3.0, which maxes out at 625MBps (5Gbps). However, if you have a computer new enough to have a Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps) or 3 or 4 (40Gbps) interface, you can opt for a superfast SSD if that fits your budget and needs.
I upgraded my 2017 Intel iMac to a 1TB Thunderbolt 3 SSD in 2020, dramatically improving its performance. The iMac died abruptly (at nearly five years old) in 2021, and I opted to shift to an M1 Mac mini. Rather than pay the premium for Apple’s 1TB internal drive on that model, I bought one with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, then migrated my iMac’s system to the external drive via a Thunderbolt 4 connection.
Later, I realized my Photos library was too slow on an external HDD. (I have two external 8TB HDDs for Time Machine backups and media storage.) To improve performance, I migrated my Photos library to an inexpensive 1TB USB 3 SSD, as described in “How to move your Mac’s Photos library to an SSD for better performance.”
You have lots of different options in which you can mix HDDs, slower SSDs, and faster SSDs to find the right mix.
With a laptop, you may find an external drive irritating to manage while traveling, but spending $100 to $300 for an external SSD might avoid a cost after trade-in of hundreds to well over $1,000.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Julie.
We’ve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently, along with answers and links to columns: read our super FAQ to see if your question is covered. If not, we’re always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours to mac911@macworld.com, including screen captures as appropriate and whether you want your full name used. Not every question will be answered, we don’t reply to email, and we cannot provide direct troubleshooting advice.
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Glenn Fleishman’s most recent books include Take Control of Untangling Connections, Take Control of Your M-Series Mac, and Take Control of Securing Your Mac. In his spare time, he writes about printing and type history. He’s a senior contributor to Macworld, where he writes Mac 911.
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