MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros unfortunately don’t allow you to swap storage drives, so here are a few ways to add extra storage to your MacBook without any hassle.
The nice thing about older MacBooks is that they come with traditional laptop hard drives that you can replace with a larger drive, making it virtually effortless to buy the lowest capacity option and upgrade the drive with more storage for less. .
However, it seems that Apple caught this trend and introduced the MacBook Air a few years ago, which comes with non-replaceable flash storage. A few years later, Apple started doing the same with its MacBook Pros by introducing user-replaceable flash storage.
At first this was a bit annoying because we mechanics could no longer open a MacBook and change things, but the good news is that this has made the MacBook Pros lighter and thinner, so we can’t complain too much.
But if you still want to add extra storage to your MacBook, there are several ways to do it; some of these involve simply plugging in a USB storage device (a flash drive or an external drive) or you can specialize. SD cards that add more storage to your MacBook while remaining almost completely hidden.
USB Flash Drives
Newer MacBooks come with USB 3.0, which provides faster read and write speeds. Having a USB 3.0 flash drive can be a great way to add extra storage to your MacBook, and while flash drives pop out of the MacBook’s body, you can easily remove them for storage on the go.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that not all USB 3.0 flash drives are created equal. While USB 3.0 is significantly faster than USB 2.0, you won’t get much faster speeds if you’re using a cheap, low-end USB 3.0 flash drive.
For example, this 16GB flash drive is only $8, but the write speed is only around 10MB/s. Again, this SanDisk Extreme 16GB flash drive It costs three times more, but has an advertised write speed of 190MB/s, which is roughly as fast as some solid-state drives.
This is important if you plan to transfer large numbers of files to the flash drive frequently, as a slow flash drive can be a terrible experience.
SD Cards
If you need something that won’t stick out as much as a flash drive, SD cards are something you can take advantage of. On newer MacBooks, SD cards stick out a bit from the side of the laptop, but certainly not as much as a flash drive, making SD cards a good option if you want something more low-profile.
However, just like with USB flash drives, it’s important to get a high quality card if you want the best transfer speeds. Unfortunately, SD cards don’t offer as fast speeds as flash drives, but they’re still pretty fast. Wire Cutter recommends most SanDisk Extreme PlusIt can provide transfer speeds of 80MB/s.
It’s also available in multiple storage sizes, up to an impressive 128GB; this can double the amount of storage on your MacBook, depending on how much flash storage you have to start with.
Special Memory Cards
If you like the idea of using an SD card for extra storage but don’t like them popping out of the slot, you might be interested in a special SD card called Nifty MiniDrive. Essentially, it’s an SD card cut so it doesn’t stick out, and it stays flush with the edge of your MacBook.
There is a microSD card slot so you can choose the storage size you want. I went ahead and used a 32GB microSD card I had lying around and it works great.
The nice thing about MiniDrive is that you can plug it in and forget it, so it’s essentially like adding 32GB of extra storage to your MacBook (or more if you choose to use a higher capacity microSD card).
One thing to be aware of is that there are many imitation models of the Nifty MiniDrive and it doesn’t quite align with some MacBook models, so if you’re planning on getting one, be sure to buy one. From the Nifty website if you want the real deal.
The card comes with an ejection tool that lets you easily eject the MiniDrive even though it sits flush with the edge, so if you have another SD card you want to access, you can easily remove and open the Nifty drive. on other SD card without too much hassle.