You can upgrade them, but Apple makes this both difficult and costly. MacBooks, in particular, often come with only 128 GB of Apple hard drive storage. The most obvious reason to use an external hard drive over and above your existing one is to extend limited storage capacity - something which has ironically become smaller over the years thanks to the SSD technology.
However, over the past decade, internal Hard Disk Drives (HDD) became bigger, cheaper, and faster to the point where needing an external drive for Mac was unnecessary for most users - until a new standard of technology was released with the Solid State Drive (SSD). External hard drives are almost identical to the hard drives found inside of your MacBook or PC - they store information the same way, but happen to be enclosed in a separate case and connected via cable (or WiFi).ĭue to their portability, external drives have long been a favorite among those needing extra room for their files, backups of their important documents, or an easy way to transfer information between machines.
