the best external hard drives for mac under 100

You also have to account for multiple generations of the PCIe interface itself.

If you have a somewhat modern motherboard, however, it most likely comes with a PCIe/NVMe-capable M.2 slot, so this is the type of SSD to look for. Some M.2 SSDs use the 20-year-old SATA interface and have the same performance limitations as any 2.5″ drive. When shopping for a new SSD, it is important to remember that M.2 is just a form factor that says nothing of the drive’s performance. You can try it out right now in Square’s latest title Forspoken. AMD and Nvidia are implementing this technology under the names Smart Access Storage and RTX IO, respectively. Throughout 2023, we should also expect high-end NVMe SSDs to become faster in gaming PCs, thanks to GPU acceleration via Microsoft’s DirectStorage API. The newer protocol includes many efficiency improvements to deal with parallel transfers and the low-latency nature of SSDs. It replaces AHCI (paired with SATA), which was originally designed for mechanical hard drives. The NVMe protocol – short for non-volatile memory express – was created to make the most out of solid state drives in combination with the PCI-Express (PCIe) interface.

The performance of any storage device boils down to how quickly it lets you move data from storage (non-volatile, slower) to DRAM (volatile, faster).

The best external hard drives for mac under 100