A selection of drive enclosures

Storage is a constant concern when purchasing Apple hardware. The cost of upgrading the internal storage of a Mac or MacBook can get very expensive very quickly, especially if other upgrades are required (see the latest Mac prices).

To save money on storage, there are other ways to get more capacity without paying Apple’s storage fees.

The easiest way is to use external drives that you can connect to your Mac. While this is handy for portable workstations, you’re often limited to one drive at best, which means you can’t store large amounts of data.

A network-attached storage (NAS) device can also work, as it solves storage limitations by accommodating multiple drives. However, you will then be limited by bandwidth, as you will need to access the drives over a slow network.

A combination of both is appropriate, and this selection of drives curated by AppleInsider solves both speed and capacity issues. By connecting directly to your Mac, you get data as fast as your connection allows and can use multiple drives at the same time.

Because you can usually add more drives manually, they’re also flexible solutions. You can easily start with a smaller amount of storage to save money and then add more later.

The OWC ThunderBay 4 is a fairly straightforward device whose aluminum housing can store up to four 3.5-inch and 2.4-inch drives, each with 20 gigabytes.

Best all-round drive enclosure for external hard drives – OWC ThunderBay 4

You can mix and match hard drives and SSDs to meet your storage needs, with access speeds of up to 1,527 MB/s under load. You also have more flexibility with RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, and 1+0 options, allowing you to balance speed and capacity with redundancy to protect your data.

It connects to your Mac via Thunderbolt, but it also has a second Thunderbolt port so you can use it as part of a daisy chain. This lets you maximize the 40Gbps bandwidth available with Thunderbolt connections on modern Macs.

The enclosure alone without drives can be purchased from Amazon for $449.99, with drive configurations from OWC ranging from 8TB for $979 to $2,649.99 for 80TB.

If you want to connect a large number of drives to your Mac, the Sabrent USB 3.2 3.5″ SATA Hard Drive Docking Station is a great choice. It’s a serious storage kit, an aluminum tower that lets you plug in up to ten 3.5″ SATA 6 drives that can be accessed from the Mac.

Best High Capacity External Drive Enclosure – Sabrent USB 3.2 3.5″ SATA Hard Drive Docking Station Without Bay

These drives can be installed without a tray, saving time. Each drive has an independent power switch, making it hot-swappable. To reduce heat, there are a pair of 120mm fans to cool everything down.

The enclosure connects to your Mac via USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C with UASP, offering up to 10Gbps of bandwidth. You don’t get any hardware RAID options here, but you can set up a software RAID if you want to get as much out of the sheer number of drives you can cram into the thing as possible.

The Sabrent Disk Tower Enclosure is available on Amazon for $599.99. Drives not included.

If you need to connect a single drive to your Mac, such as a large capacity hard drive for Time Machine backups, consider the UGreen USB-C Hard Drive Enclosure.

Best External Drive Enclosure for Single Hard Drive – UGreen USB-C Hard Drive Enclosure

It’s an aluminum chassis that should fit the cases of most Mac models, and it’s also quite compact. With a single 2.5-inch SATA SSD, it offers plenty of speed while still being portable.

Because it’s an enclosure that you put a drive in, you can choose how much you want in it, with no tools required. It supports up to 6Gbps and connects via USB 3.1 Gen 2 with a USB-C to USB-C cable.

The UGreen USB-C Hard Drive Enclosure costs $24.99 on Amazon, making it a relatively easy purchase for anyone with a spare hard drive.

Of course, you can have many drives, but if you want speed and save money at the same time, there are relatively few options. The TerraMaster D8 Hybrid could be a good solution in this case.

Best Hybrid External Drive Enclosure – TerraMaster D8 Hybrid

The TerraMaster D8 Hybrid Drive, an enclosure we reviewed in May, is an enclosure that can accommodate a total of eight drives. It consists of four bays that can accommodate 24 TB SATA hard drives as well as four NVMe M.2 SSDs, giving a theoretical maximum of 128 TB.

The advantage is that you can use a combination of fast storage for frequently accessed data and cheaper, higher capacity hard drives for long-term storage. There are even JBOD, Single, RAID 0, RAID 1 and even 2+6 RAID configurations available.

As for speeds over the USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, you can achieve read speeds of up to 980 MB/s and write speeds of 880 MB/s for the individual M.2 drives, speeds of 560 MB/s for individual SATA SSDs, and 1,016 MB/s when accessing four SSDs together.

OK, we have to admit, this isn’t technically an enclosure, but it’s something that can help anyone who has a bunch of old drives. Drives that have data on them that’s valuable enough to access occasionally, but not enough to keep installed on a device.

Best Device for Accessing Archive Drives – Sabrent USB Type-C SATA Dual-Bay Hard Drive Docking System

If you’re a data collector and have a lot of drives stored on the shelf, the Sabrent USB Type-C SATA Dual Bay Hard Drive Docking Station lets you access them quickly. The toaster-like hardware is connected at 5Gbps USB 3.0 and can accommodate up to two 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives in its two slots, which can then be mounted and read on your Mac.

Once you’ve accessed what you need, you can unmount the drive and eject it from the device before storing it away safely. If you have a drive that’s almost dead, there’s also an offline clone feature that lets you copy data from one drive to a newer one.