Summary

1. Best Hard Drive Tools For Mac
2. External Hard Drive For Mac
3. Best Hard Drive Utility For Mac
4. Best Hard Disk Repair Software For Mac
5. Best Portable Hard Drives For Mac

You may need to perform hard drive recovery after accidentally deleting important files from your hard disk or formatting the device. To recover files from your hard drive, you can use the reliable HDD recovery software - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. It will help you do hard disk recovery in various data loss situations easily.

Best Disk Imaging Tool: Clonezilla. Clonezilla is one of the most useful free hard drive repair software tools. It allows you to easily create full partition and disk backups, which can be deployed on other computers. Clonezilla supports far more file systems than most IT professionals can name, and it even features some basic boot repair tools. Although Disk Utility is a simple to use disk management tool built into all Macs, it has limited functions when it comes to advanced partitioning. For example, it won't work when you want to resize Boot Camp partition to arrange free disk space, or when you need to partition an external hard drive only to find the option is grayed out. In particular, if your Mac is equipped with a spinning hard disk drive, somehow its life tends to end earlier compared to an SSD (solid-state drive). If your Macintosh HD fails, it could cause a number of problems — one of which is data loss.

About Hard Drive Recovery

'Last night, when I was planning to continue with my paper, I could not find it anywhere. Then I remembered that the day before yesterday I deleted some useless files and documents from the hard disk and then I emptied the recycle bin immediately. Is there any way to get my lost files back?'

1. Of course, hard-disk tools have to be able to recover, repair and make hard disks faster, but the extra features are important too, so we'll be awarding points for added functionality.
2. IPartiton for Mac is a known partition manager tool that is helpful in the efficient performing of partition related task on Mac hard drive.

Actually, in addition to accidental deletion, there are many other situations in which you may need to perform hard drive recovery:

• You formatted the hard drive by accident or to solve problems like 'you need to format the disk in drive X before you can use it'
• You ran diskpart clean command on a hard disk and all the files and partitions were removed
• Your hard drive has a RAW file system and thus becomes inaccessible
• The hard disk is not showing files in Windows
• Your hard disk is crashed, damaged, corrupted, or dead

Generally, as long as your HDD is not physically damaged or broken like in the fifth situation, you can use disk recovery software to recover data from the hard drive. However, if your storage medium is dead or crashed, you are highly recommended to ask help from manual data recovery services.

The Tool You Need: Hard Drive Recovery Software

Why hard disk data can be recovered? Hard disk data recovery is possible with the data remanence feature, which means that data continues to exist on the hard disk drive even after it has been deleted or formatted. Although the lost files still exist on the disk, you have no entry to it. That why you need hard drive recovery software, like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, to access and retrieve your data.

• Recover all existing file types like photos, videos, audio files, emails, documents, Microsoft files, Adobe files...
• Recover data from after deletion, formatting, file system becoming RAW or inaccessible
• Recover data lost due to virus attack, OS crash, OS reinstallation, partition loss

This software fully supports these storage devices:

Supported storage media: Internal hard drive (HDD/SSD), External hard drive, Hybrid Hard Drive (SSDH), USB flash drive, SD card, CF Card, digital cameras, etc.

Supported hard disk brands: Seagate, SanDisk, Kingstone, Western Digital, Toshiba, Buffalo, LaCie, Samsung, Adata, G-Tech, etc.

How to Recover Files from Hard Drive

EaseUS data recovery software is widely popular for its usability. With it, you can perform hard drive data recovery with only a few simple clicks. Both video tutorial and detailed steps are provided below. Choose the one you prefer to learn how to perform hard drive recovery with ease.

How to start hard drive recovery with EaseUS hard drive recovery software:

Step 1. Choose a location to scan.

• Make sure that all hard drives were correctly connected and recognized by the software. Refresh an external hard disk if necessary.
• From which drive was data lost? Choose the relevant hard drive partition by left-clicking on it.
• Click the Scan button.

Step 2. Wait for the scanning results.

• It takes a while for EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to complete the scan, all depending on how much disk space is used on the selected hard drive.
• As you see, the 'Deleted files' result would come our first, later it's all lost data result.
• You can try to recover lost data as soon as it shows up even though the scanning process has not finished yet.

Step 3. Filter the result and recover data.

There are multiple ways for you to find the target files. Anyway, choose the quickest method.

• Lost Partition Files: more lost data are going to be found on your selected partition and put in this section if it was formatted or deleted in early time.
• Extra Files: a deep-scan result for raw files even though the file names and file paths have been lost.
• Filter: extremely useful when you're looking for a specific type of files such as pictures, documents, music, videos, etc.

Select files and click the Recover button. (You can always choose to preview files before purchasing a license code for a full hard drive data recovery. )

Top Questions About Hard Disk Data Recovery

There are two matters you may care about:

Question 1. How Much Does It Cost to Recover Hard Drive Data?

Do you think that data recovery will cost a lot?

In fact, the average hard drive recovery cost in 2019 is from zero to thousands of dollars. In such an information era with advanced technology, recovery of deleted or lost hard drive data has become so approachable.

In terms of the eventual cost of retrieving every bit of valuable data from a hard drive, you're strongly suggested to stay up to date with 'the latest came out hard drive recovery cost 2019' so that you can spend the least amount of money on recovering your disk data. Getting the best price on either data recovery service or online data recovery software to recover data from inaccessible, dead, damaged or corrupted hard disk.

Question 2. What Is the Best Hard Disk Data Recovery Software in 2019?

Speaking of hard disk data recovery software, you can Google it online, getting overwhelmed result of various tools provided by different producers. So how to effortlessly and quickly search a suitable one for your case becomes the next question.

And here is a list for you to check and quickly decide which tool to choose among the searching result:

• Is it fully compatible with your current system?
• Is it easy to use for hard disk recovery?
• Is it cheap? And does it have a complete refund policy? (This matters a lot, of course.)
• Is it easy to approach the tech support team, receiving immediately online tech support?
• How is the recovery quality? Is it easy to restore lost data from complex situations?

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard isn't the most expensive nor cheapest data recovery software. It is widely popular among users but it depends on you to check whether it's the most suitable choice for you. Honestly speaking, as long as your hard disk drive is not physically damaged and the lost data on the disk is not overwritten by new content, you can use it to recover data from your hard drive.

The Bottom Line

Data loss on hard drives and other storage devices occurs more frequently than you think. Although performing data recovery after data gets lost is useful, it's better to make a backup of your important files elsewhere. By doing so, you can recover data from the backup easily when data loss happens.

Welcome to our guide to buying the best external hard drive or backup hard drive in 2019. When looking to buy the best external hard drive for your needs, there are quite a lot of things you need to consider - and this guide will help you.

Plus, with Amazon Prime Day 2019 rapidly approaching, there's a good chance that we're going to see some major price cuts to the best external hard drives out there. If you do find a killer deal for any of the drives on this best external hard drive list, then you can buy in full confidence that you're getting a brilliant external drive for your money.

When buying the best external hard drive for your needs, you need to make sure you get a device that can safely and securely store your important files. Reliability is of the upmost importance here, as you do not want to buy an external hard drive that fails on you - making you lose all your important backups.

The best external hard drives will also be quick - either because they use SSD (Solid State Drive) technology, or because they use the latest connectivity technology, such as USB-C.

The biggest deciding factors when it comes to data transfer rates is the connection the drive uses, and whether it is a standard hard drive or a solid state drive (SSD). Many external hard drives use USB 2.0 connections, but for faster speeds you'll want USB 3.0 or ideally the newer USB Type-C connection. You'll need to ensure your PC or laptop also has a USB Type-C port.

You'll also need to think about how much storage space you need. The best external hard drives offer a range of capacities. We'd recommend 500GB to start with, as that gives you plenty of space to store your files without costing too much money.

However, if you deal in large files, such as high resolution photos and videos, then you may want to consider buying a bigger drive, with external hard drives offering terabytes (TB) of storage space.

Buying the best external hard drive for your needs involves figuring out how much space you need. You don't want to buy an external hard drive that's too small, and end up running out of space, but neither do you really want to pay over the odds for storage space you'll never need.

So, we've listed the best external hard drives money can buy in 2019. Each external drive (or backup hard drive) on this page has been carefully picked to make sure it offers fast data transfer speeds – essential if you move lots of big files regularly – while also offering sturdy build quality so you don't have to worry about them breaking and losing your files.

When buying the best external hard drive for your needs, there are certain things you need to take into account. For example, you'll want to make sure you have a drive that offers fast data transfer speeds.

In this guide we list the best external hard drives with both traditional hard drives and faster (and more expensive) solid state drives.

Still, the best external hard drives are also dependable and rugged, so you can safely store your data without worry. The best external drives will also be light enough to carry in your bag, with large capacities so that you can keep your data safe when travelling.

There's a huge range of external hard drives on offer, so we've put together this list of the best external hard drives to help you find the perfect one for your needs.

1. Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC external hard drive

Wireless security

Capacity: 2TB | Interface: USB 3.0

An external hard drive you can buy without breaking the bank, Buffalo's MiniStation Extreme NFC could be your match made in heaven.

With compatibility for both Mac and Windows machines, the Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC is very flexible, and comes with a rugged case that's dust and water resistant, along with a built-in USB 3.0 cable.

Not only is your data kept protected from knocks and drops with the rugged shell, but it's also got 256-bit AES security features and NFC (Near Field Communication) features as well.

Essentially it allows you to unlock the drive to get to your files quickly and easily by tapping the supplied NFC card onto the drive's body. Pretty neat!

• This product is only available in the US at the time of this writing. UK and Australian readers: check out a fine alternative in the Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro

2. Western Digital My Passport Ultra 4TB external hard drive

Comes with Encryption and a long warranty

Capacity: 4TB | Interface: USB 3.0

The latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport Ultra range of external hard drives has landed, coming in sizes from 1TB to 4TB. It features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD's own software suite.

It is a good performer when it comes to data transfer speeds but doesn't come near the top of the leaderboard. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't reach the top speeds of solid state external drives, but for external hard drives based on traditional HDDs, this is the drive to consider.

3. Samsung T5 SSD external hard drive

The best external SSD of 2018

Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB | Interface: USB Type-C

If you'd rather have an external hard drive that took advantage of solid state drive (SSD) speeds, then the Samsung Portable SSD T5 is definitely the best external hard drive for you. Samsung has a brilliant reputation for external SSDs, thanks to products like the T3, and the T5 builds on its predecessor by adding a fast USB Type-C connection that ekes out every last drop of performance from the solid state drive inside. Of course, it's also backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 if your PC doesn't have USB Type-C. It's expensive, but it's well worth the cash.

Read the full review: Samsung Portable SSD T5

4. Adata SD700 External SSD

Capacity: 256GB, 512GB or 1TB | Interface: USB 3.0

The Adata SD700 will suit those looking for a rugged storage device that can provide ample capacity without costing too much. It performs superbly well and remains the only SSD we’ve seen that is IP68 rated.

Thanks to the solid state drive that resides in this external hard drive, it's a lot faster than external drives that use traditional spinning hard drives - so you're getting great transfer speeds as well as rugged protection.

It also comes in capacities up to 1TB, so you don't have to worry about missing out on storage space just because it uses an SSD - this drive really does hit all the right notes.

5. WD My Book Duo 4TB external hard drive

Capacity: 4TB | Interface: USB 3.0 x 2

If you're looking for the absolute largest capacity external hard drive, then the WD My Book Duo 4TB is the one to get, offering a huge 4TB (you can also get versions with up to 20TB) of storage space over two hard drives.

If you don't mind sacrificing some of the ample storage space you can set the drives up in a RAID array, so you have file backups of your files should one of the drives die.

This USB 3.0 drive has many of the features of a fully-fledged NAS device (including a high price), and if you have a router with a USB 3.0 port you could use this as a network attached storage device in its own right.

The device, which comes with two-year warranty, has 256-bit AES hardware encryption, and automatic backup software (WD SmartWare Pro).

Worth noting that the enclosure used is fully serviceable and that WD ships the drive already pre-formatted for Windows users (NTFS).

6. Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt external hard drive

Best Thunderbolt external hard drive

Capacity: 1TB, 2TB | Interface: Thunderbolt, USB 3.0

If you have a device with a Thunderbolt port, then this is a great option, as it provides twice the speeds of standard USB 3.0 drives. It's also not especially expensive compared to other Thunderbolt drives. The price is kept down due to its use of a traditional hard drive, rather than an SSD, which limits the potential speeds. It also comes with a USB 3.0 port for people without access to Thunderbolt.

• This product is only available in the US and UK at the time of this writing. Australian readers: check out a fine alternative in the WD MyBook Duo

7. Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive 5TB

Capacity: 5TB | Interface: USB 3.0

If you want to combine speed and capacity, then the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is definitely worth considering. It comes in a range of sizes up to 8TB and it beats the competition when it comes to read and write speeds as well.

On top of this storage and speed, you get a decent amount of peace of mind thanks to Seagate's lower than average failure rates, especially in bigger capacity hard drives.

You also get backup software, and the drive is compatible with both Windows and Macs, though it's formatted for Windows out of the box unless you go for a Mac-specific hard drive - though these are more expensive.

8. Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro external hard drive

Capacity: 2TB | Interface: USB 3.0 and Wi-Fi

Even if we had mixed feelings on past versions of the My Passport Wireless, the 2016 “pro” variant of the external HDD restores faith in the Western Digital name. The design, for one, has been overhauled and no longer resembles the My Passport Ultra or My Passport for Mac. Instead, there’s now a more premium feel to the My Passport Wireless Pro. It resembles an external DVD drive, but considering the onboard SD card slot, don’t worry about getting it confused with anything else. For photographers, this will make the Wireless Pro stand out.

For everyone else, there’s a massive 6,400mAh battery built into the device. This lets the drive be used completely free of wires over 2.4GHz or 5GHz channels. When it’s wired up, however, don’t expect cutting edge connection tech, as the My Passport Wireless Pro uses only USB Type-B to Type-A. Completely absent is the latest and greatest USB-C connection.

Where the My Passport Wireless Pro compromises on affordability, it’s able to benefit in just about every other area. Of course, not everyone needs a wireless hard drive or SD card support, but for those who do, it’s almost essential.

Read the full review:Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro

9. LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive 4TB

Capacity: 4TB | Interface: USB-C

You may have stumbled upon the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive when perusing the Apple website for USB-C accessories. There’s a reason for that: the Porsche Design ships with both USB Type-C to Type-A and USB Type-C to Type-C connectors, making it a worthy candidate regardless of your setup.

It’s expensive for an external hard drive, don’t get us wrong, especially if you’re in the market for the top-end 4TB option. On the other hand, this is an HDD that could theoretically output speeds of up to 5Gbps, if it weren’t hindered by the limits of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology.

Best Hard Drive Tools For Mac

Comprising five 800GB platters in a 15mm form factor, the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile is an excellent challenger to the Seagate M3, though it’s notably bigger in both weight and dimensions.

Sure, it packs an extra convenience factor in the form of USB-C, but it should be noted that the Porsche Design Mobile is still limited to USB 3.0 speeds. Plus, even an aluminum finish can’t prevent it from clashing with your Rose Gold MacBook. Nevertheless, LaCie’s offering is the best USB-C external HDD money can buy, at least for the time being.

Read our full review:LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive 4TB

10. iStorage diskAshur 2TB external hard drive

External Hard Drive For Mac

Best for security

Best Hard Drive Utility For Mac

Capacity: 2TB | Interface: USB 3.0

Typically, iStorage hard disks cater best to governments and multinational organizations around the world, for good reason too – they offer tight security like no other drives around.

If someone tries to tamper with your iStorage drive, you can configure it to self-desturct. What's more, the data is encrypted by the 256-bit AES protocol, with multiple forms of protection in place to ensure the bad guys don't get in no matter how persistent. When you consider all that extra security, the prices won't scare you away either.

Best Hard Disk Repair Software For Mac

Sure, it's still expensive, four times the price of an equivalent 2TB drive, and unlikely to be the most nimble performer. But, you're paying for a product that's virtually uncrackable. Bear in mind, though, you'll get no help from the manufacturer if things go awry and you lose your password.

Read our full review: iStorage diskAshur DT

Best Portable Hard Drives For Mac

Gabe Carey and Matt Hanson also contributed to this article