If you want the biggest and highest-capacity external hard drive, Black Friday is the time to buy.
I have a personal recommendation on a Thunderbolt enclosure that fits four full-size hard drives or SSDs, so you can get the fastest storage in enormous capacities. I’ve used the OWC ThunderBay 4 for about a year (having purchased the hard drives last Black Friday, coincidentally enough) and it’s served me well for all my odd purposes.
Here’s how to get the fastest, biggest external storage this shopping season.
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My favorite external hard drive setup on Black Friday
The OWC ThunderBay 4 offers incredibly capable external storage for Mac users, with full Thunderbolt connectivity. That unlocks real-world transfer speeds over 1500 MB/s, an enormous storage capacity of 96 TB and the ability to daisy-chain other Thunderbolt accessories like a display.
If you pay close attention to Apple announcements, you may be aware that the new M4-based Macs are capable of next-generation Thunderbolt 5 — but there don’t appear to be any storage solutions like this on the market yet. For the time being, the ThunderBay 4 is still the best you can get.
For the best value, get the option that doesn’t include any built-in storage, which is on sale from its usual $449 down to $399. You can take advantage of other deals on storage and install the hard drives yourself. That’s what I did; it’s totally fool-proof. You just unlock the door on the front and slide the disks into their perfectly-sized slots.
Buy from: Amazon
Cheap high-capacity hard drives
For the storage, I bought four 8 TB hard drives from Seagate, a reputable brand. This gave me an incredible 32 TB of storage. These drives are on sale for $110 each.
Using macOS Disk Utility, you can merge these four drives as one single disk in a RAID array. From there, you can create separate volumes — one for Time Machine, one for storage.
You can set up the RAID array using the full 32 TB capacity. Or, for redundancy and safety, you can use 16 TB and have a backup for safety.
Buy from: Amazon
What can you use it for?
All in all, you’ll have a massive amount of fast storage. What do I use it for myself?
- Time Machine backups of my Mac mini, on a separate volume.
- Hosting a Plex library of TV shows and movies for streaming from my Apple TV or iPhone. It’s like setting up your own bespoke streaming service with your home computer as a server.
- Keeping a giant video archive of Apple keynotes and advertisements, useful for my research and work.
- Storing a complete second copy of my entire photo library.
- Backing up the hard drives of all the old computers in my collection, an ongoing project.
The possibilities are endless when you have 32 TB of storage.
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