Best (cheaper) Mac 1-2T backup drive?
0So finally my backup portable drive bit the dust (it’s like 6 or so years old and not so much storage). I need suggestions for a good 1-2T portable backup drive that works with a Mac and time machine. Reading reviews it looks like some of them don’t work with time machine, others say WIN/Mac but you have to reformat with Mac… I have a mid 2013 Macbook air (thank you applecare!!! when they couldn’t repair an older Macbook that was almost out of warranty). Suggestions for something reliable and won’t break the bank would be helpful. Hoping to buy it on Labor Day to take advantage of sales. Thanks!
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Most reliable right now seem to be:
Seagate just jumped ahead of WD and was considerably worse at failures the previous years. One source.
Any drive will work… you will have to reformat it if its not formatted to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” which you can do in Disk Utility on your mac.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784
You can always get the box that says “mac compatible” but in my opinion a pre-formatted drive is not worth the price difference.
@thismyusername I love Backblaze’s HDD reviews, but it’s worth noting that 100% spin time 24/7 is not typical of a home user, and Backblaze has pointed out that their data isn’t great since they aren’t able to procure mass quantities of drives from certain vendors (note how low the overall numbers from Toshiba are vs. Seagate & Hitachi). Also, HGST is owned by WD, so… what the hell, guys?
@brhfl they bought them… and have not ruined them… yet.
I find seeing how their product perform under stress is the best indicator of how well they are designed and built.
The seagate issues were pretty well distributed throughout their entire product line… it appears they have a handle on it again.
As with all mass produced goods, even with the worst design/build quality, a company will produce a few that are fine.
@thismyusername The thing is that Backblaze isn’t even attempting to provide a comprehensive review process for hard drives, they just publish internal statistics based on the drives they use in their data center which, largely, are not models you would purchase for consumer use. It’s interesting data, but by and large it doesn’t translate well into the consumer market.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@thismyusername the other issue is blindly following charts like the one you posted here. If I remember correctly (updated post below when I remembered) the WD drives currently in use are significantly older drives. Note how the Seagate figure drastically dropped with the addition of ~18,000 new drives. New drives are less likely to fail, unless you really dig down deep into the data they provide (it’s available as a dump from their site) it’s very dangerous to use them as a source for comparing the brands.
@thismyusername Not trying to be rude, I’m not entirely sure what your first sentence is in response to, though. While I do agree that a unit under stress is a valuable indicator, you’re talking about different sorts of stress than what a consumer deals with. 100% spin time is a stress test, sure, but it’s not the same as constantly starting and stopping.
@jbartus I think they do primarily use consumer-grade drives, actually. Interesting read.
@brhfl I was saying that WD bought HGST and has not destroyed their product yet… HGST is still producing better product than that which is sold as WD.
@thismyusername Got it! I thought the ‘they’ was Backblaze.
@brhfl Was interesting. Did some poking around the blog… conclusion I reached is I have no clue… Found out that for the most part drives aren’t/weren’t on sale this weekend so have more time to figure out what I am doing.
Reformatting is easy. Frankly, if you’re only using it with a Mac, you’ll want to reformat no matter what, so you’re using the native filesystem. So, just write that off as something you’ll have to Google or ask here and do. You can save money by buying the enclosure and the drive separately. I would, at this juncture, say to stick with Hitachi or WD drives, but a million fanboys will descend with their own experiences of how x brand hard drive has screwed them into oblivion. A hard drive is a grossly complex machine — it spins a pile of magnetic disks super fast while scrubbing it with an evil robot arm. It basically exists to fail. So, you’ll get some vocal opinions as anyone who regularly rotates drives has been bitten hard by one manufacturer or another. Anyway, everything adheres to basically the same standards these days, which is great! Get an enclosure that has decent reviews and works with whatever speed USB ports you have (2013 Air… USB 3, I believe), and whatever hard drive is affordable and fits the enclosure (2.5 vs. 3.5 inch). If you can use a screwdriver, you can assemble your own external drive out of these two items. Generally you’re talking about eight screws or fewer.
We’ve used Seagate (2TB) and Transcend Storejet (1TB) USB3 connected and powered drives without issue. Seagate’s reputation lately isn’t what it used to be but still no issues.
Both were bought from Amazon when they were daily deal/gold box specials. Sorry don’t recall the price I paid but around $70 and $50 respectively sounds right.
As a general reminder… if the data (pictures, videos, music, documents, etc) is truly important always try to have at least two copies of it… and preferably have one copy away from the other… like in a safety deposit box or a friends or relatives house (do a data storage swap).
Western Digital has been a largely bulletproof name in the hard drive market for decades for a reason, while the Backblaze chart posted earlier doesn’t really seem to indicate the best reliability there were factors I can’t remember right now that really undermined the validity of those statistics. Factors other than the comparatively small sample size for WD drives and the fact they actually own HGST anyhow…
With that said, I’d recommend a MyBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E6N9GS4
I don’t really see how you will do much better than ~70 bucks and the drives really are quite high quality. I’ve never had a failure among WD externals in the past ~10 years other than one someone knocked off a desk during an intensive write cycle. This much I cannot say of my personal Seagate drive that used to house my ripped TV collection…
Edit: Oh yeah, I think I remember now. If you dig into the Backblaze statistics their charts don’t account for the age of the drives, IIRC the WD drives in their data center are basically geriatric. Note how the Seagate figure dropped down drastically because they added 18,000 new Seagate drives. New drives are infinitely less likely to fail.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They’re all more or less the same these days. I mean, yeah, if you’re running a server farm that buys drives by the pallet you can worry about the minutia, but for a single drive doing nothing more strenuous than backups? Whatever name brand you can get cheapest, you’re rolling the same dice either way- I guess with the one caveat that it doesn’t have overwhelmingly negative reviews or anything like that. Particularly for pre-built external drives the options are pretty limited as far as the details of the actual drive’s specs go, so as long as it’s got the right type of cable I wouldn’t worry about the rest. The one suggestion I would make is to check out the larger sizes before you settle in the 1-2tb range. The cost per tb drops off pretty damn quick these days as the size increases.
Oh, and the formatting? A drives a drive. If it’s not correct right outta the box then, well, I’ve never done it on a Mac but, hold on lemme just Google that… yeah looks easy as crap to rectify. Really I’d go ahead and format it anyway, to know it’s done right and purge any bs the manufacturer may have stuck on there.
https://www.google.com/#q=mac+formatting+external+drive+for+time+machine+
@nogoodwithnames just chiming in to second the motion to format anyhow. It’s super easy!
Yeah, everyone’s right. So just buy one or two and format and use 'em. Mainly, do you want tiny - 2.5" or big - 3.5"?
@sligett they want either one in an external housing.
@sligett looking for an external drive, don’t care whether it is 2.5 or 3.5
@Kidsandliz @jbartus Ah, I wasn’t clear. An external 2.5" drive often fits in a shirt pocket, while an external 3.5" drive is more the size of a brick. All else being equal, you may have a size preference.
But maybe more relevant, the 3.5" drive will need more power and will come with an AC adapter while the 2.5" drive will be USB powered.
@sligett the 2.5" drives tend to be less reliable compared to 3.5" drives of the same capacity though, and also tend to support but not include a power adapter which is necessary to achieve optimal transfer speeds so there is a tradeoff there too.
@jbartus As I am only using it for backups probably it won’t matter in the long run for me since it will have so few uses comparatively speaking. Likely I will go with cheaper.
@Kidsandliz 3.5 inch drives will likely be cheaper because of the perceived value of compactness regardless of reliability to a certain overly large market segment.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Either way your logic is fairly sound, though!
Thanks everyone for your advice… Locally in a non big box store they have a LaCie for sale. Is that any good? Funky orange cover is not worth paying for, but price is heavily discounted.
@Kidsandliz funny enough, the first failure of a hd for me was a LaCie (about a decade ago - heavily discounted) failed within a couple of months!
As others have already mentioned the newer ones are better so…
Having one external for TimeMachine is fine. It is really a much better idea to get a second drive to save your important data - photos etc - on that second drive. If you get serious about saving your data then it is usually suggested to have a desktop with two disk in a RAID 1 configuration where the first disk is where your data is saved and the second disk is where a copy is being made.
From what I have read many failures are not from the disks but from the enclosures.
btw, congrats on getting your machine replaced by AppleCare!
@fjp999 Apparently the rule, at least in this case, is if they fail to fix it after three tries they replace it.
@Kidsandliz LaCie drives are okay for what you’re trying to do with Time Machine. I agree in principle with what fjp999 suggests with the caveat that RAID 1 is barely better than no RAID at all, you still lose everything in the case of a nasty power event, fire, etc.
I would suggest considering using some kind of off-site backup solution for your important files and things you want to keep safe. Off-site backups don’t need to be pricey solutions either, for example you could store your files on Amazon Glacier for $0.007/GB per month (yes, two zeroes before the seven after the decimal point). To give you some idea of applicable cost, if you were to store your entire 2 terabyte backup on Amazon Glacier it would only cost you $14.36/mo. Odds are you aren’t going to have nearly that much of a capacity requirement.
Storing off-site has a variety of benefits but the most important is that if anything were to ever happen to your house your data is safe. There is also redundancy in Amazon’s (or any cloud provider really) server setups so even if they were to have an issue on their end your data is already living in a RAID array and can be recovered.
@Kidsandliz LaCie these days is a product of seagate, in the past they also used a lot of seagates inside but they also used various mfgs in the early days. That funky orange cover indicates to me that it is this model:
That is basically a bumper case on it.
The advantage to LaCies (for those in the video and heavy data biz) is that they used to have a FireWire port on them… and if your mac/pc has a firewire port it was a much faster way to move data since usb was so slow.
@thismyusername yeah that is what I had that I need to replace.
4TB mac refurbished drive by newegg via ebay for $69. http://m.ebay.com/itm/291799630670
@communist Thanks for the link
@communist @kidsandliz I’m not sure I’d want to use a refurbished drive as my main source of backup, even knowing that most hardware refurbs are new product returned as open box that is most likely fine. The failure rate on hard drives is already really high.
Don’t bother with a fancy name brand external drive. Instead, buy a reliable enclosure and add your own drive. You can find a good enclosure from the reviews on Amazon or Newegg. OWC has some fine enclosures for Macs but they tend to cost a bit more.
Liz - two more ideas -
a. Today, newegg has a WD 2TB Elements Protable Hard Drive USB 3.0 Model WDBU6Y0020BBK-EESN Black on shell-shocker sale for $76. Yes, a truly protable hard drive.
b. You seemed to want a simple solution, but going the other direction, re-use the case for your dead external hard drive and put a new drive in it.
@sligett Thanks for the suggestion. I haven’t even thought of (b). Might be cheaper.