Get faster files on Mac
More storage — and speed — is at your fingertips
Storage holds on to data on your Mac after the power is turned off. The first thing you need to store is macOS: back in 1984 this came on a removable floppy disk, but nowadays you need it on a fixed drive so it can be accessed quickly. You’ll then need room for documents, music, apps, photos and videos.
For the past 30 years, the startup disk inside most Macs has been a mechanical hard disk, but the balance is shifting to solid–state drives (SSDs), which use silicon chips that retain information when powered down, unlike a computer’s main memory. These work faster, but are expensive. A terabyte of 7,200rpm hard disk costs around $85 and reads and writes data at about 150MB/sec; keeping in mind that writing is usually a bit slower and certain tasks, such as reading a lot of small files, can take longer. A low–end SSD of that same capacity costs around $249.99 by comparison and delivers up to about 500MB/sec.
Adding an SSD makes starting up your Mac and opening apps much faster. In fact, because any busy Mac constantly pulls pieces of data from storage into memory, and may swap it out to storage and back as you switch tasks, your system will be far more responsive if its startup disk is an SSD. Intense tasks like video editing, which need to stream data from storage in real time, benefit even more. Ramping up the speed The NVMe SSDs in MacBooks and iMac Pros have been ramping up in speed, with some now exceeding 3,000MB/sec. Apple connects these using interfaces based on PCI Express (PCIe), similar to — but not compatible with — the M.2 sockets on newer PC motherboards.
A terabyte of NVMe SSD will set you back around $449.99 at retail, or $899.99 at Apple’s iMac Pro build–to–order prices.
In the consumer iMac range, Apple offers hard disks as the base option, and then a halfway house it calls a Fusion Drive. This combines a hard disk with a small SSD into what looks like a single drive in Finder, but is managed so that data you use regularly, including macOS, is kept on the fast SSD, and everything else on the mechanical drive. That means you get the general responsiveness of an SSD–based system, but with lots of space and less cost than a high–capacity SSD.
All MacBook versions now have only SSD storage, starting at 128GB. You may
need to consider a compact USB stick or SD card, if your model has the necessary socket to offload something large. Accessing files from the cloud or using an external drive or network–attached storage (NAS) are other options.
When you run out of space on your startup disk, few Macs now have room for internal expansion. Either replace the disk with the same type but a larger capacity, or add external storage. iMacs use standard 2.5–inch or 3.5–inch hard disks (in 21.5–inch and 27–inch models, respectively), so you can use a standard part, but getting inside and reassembling is tough. It’s best done by your local Apple repair shop. With SSD–based Macs, those made after 2012 have drives needing to be replaced with bespoke Apple parts.
Outside interests
That leaves the external option. Thunderbolt 3 ports on current iMacs and MacBook Pros are ideal, since their 40Gbps bandwidth is fast enough for every type of storage. The drives cost, but you can connect a more affordable USB 3.1 drive with a suitable cable.
The USB–C port on 12–inch MacBooks supports only USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) — more than adequate for most people’s needs. The Mac Pro has Thunderbolt 2 ports, giving 20Gbps via a Mini DisplayPort connector. Its USB 3.0 ports, like those of older consumer Macs, are limited to 5Gbps.
Thunderbolt 2 or 3 SSDs are ideal for high–end tasks, but note that Thunderbolt 1 and 2 aren’t intercompatible with 3 without an adapter, which works for data but not a Thunderbolt display.