Good External SSD for Mac?

[Kinda_Evil]

Hey guys,

I would like to be able to burn and transfer episodes of my favorite show from my Windows pc and then watch them on my Macbook Pro. However, I have no idea what external SSDs might be good and Amazon wasn't much help. When you search for external SSDs, the first one that comes up is a "Amazon's Choice" Samsung T5 1TB, which has multiple reviews saying it doesn't play nice with Mac. So if anyone has any recommendations, it'd be much appreciated.

 

[MBAir2010]

i use a seagate for both MacBook and Dell XPS only for movies and tv shows
the hard drive was pre formatted for both systems
there are ways to format any drive for both systems, i forgot the Letters
(exFAT i think) which is in the disk utilities in macOSX.

 

[chrfr]

Hey guys,

I would like to be able to burn and transfer episodes of my favorite show from my Windows pc and then watch them on my Macbook Pro. However, I have no idea what external SSDs might be good and Amazon wasn't much help. When you search for external SSDs, the first one that comes up is a "Amazon's Choice" Samsung T5 1TB, which has multiple reviews saying it doesn't play nice with Mac. So if anyone has any recommendations, it'd be much appreciated.

I've used a number of Samsung T5s on my Macs, as have many other posters on this forum, and have had no issues with them whatsoever.

 

[chabig]

I've had issues with Samsung T5s, like failing to mount. Also, if you want to update their firmware you must install a Samsung app, and then boot to recovery mode to reduce the security level on your Mac in order to grant permission for a system extension to run. That requires more trust than I'm willing to give Samsung.

Now I'm using a Sandisk USB SSD that's working great on two M1 Macs.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

i use a seagate for both MacBook and Dell XPS only for movies and tv shows
the hard drive was pre formatted for both systems
there are ways to format any drive for both systems, i forgot the Letters
(exFAT i think) which is in the disk utilities in macOSX.

Dang... I had a drive formatted exFAT, and tried to write some files to it, and it 'crashed', my IMP rebooted too. So afterward, I put it on my windows server, and was able to pull everything off of it, and then took three times to wipe it, and just formatted it as APFS. It's still working, but what happened to pervert that drive is just, wow. Writing to it did produce an error message, but I could still see the drive, but couldn't copy anything from, or to it on any mac.

Yeah, weird, and strange with a dollop of huh on top.

 

[MBAir2010]

ouch!
the seagate is really good, and I'm a WD site member.
I also formatted a toshiba drive for both the dell an macbook air which works wonders as well.
my problem is that stupid m shaped plug that keeps on falling out when i sneeze or breathe.

windows is more forgiving on retrieving files than mac, if i had a faultily usb thumb drive- i would use a friends windows laptop to see if that worked, which it did- but not the macbook air, and the files were not openable in any laptop.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

You didn't tell us WHICH MacBook Pro you have.
Does it have USB-c ports?

If so, you could do this:
1. Get an "nvme" blade drive of your choice.
2. Get a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure
3. Put the drive into the enclosure (as easy as it gets).
4. Format to HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
5. Use it.

This will work with a Mac that has only USB3 "a" ports as well. It will just run a little slower.

 

[Traverse]

I've been using a 4TB Western Digital Blue SDD in an OWC BUS-powered enclosure for over a year now and it's been fine.