Decent (and affordable) back up drive for a Mac?

@legendornothing Thanks

@legendornothing Thanks for that info too.

@legendornothing Well yes I could (and have) but there are enough geeks on here that I figured that people might know which ones are best for my purpose since there appears to be a ton of choices, many of which have a number of stars, but that may or may not be representative of the likelihood of lasting for years.

@Kidsandliz be aware when purchasing that hard drives are inherently failure-prone and have, last I checked (and I doubt it’s changed), the single highest failure rate among computer components. This is mainly due to their nature (metal disks spinning at high speed among other metal components with the requirement of a high degree of precision vs. the mostly static activity of other components). Definitely go with a solid brand like Western Digital, HGST, or Seagate but just realize that yours could be one of the bad ones, it’s a bit of a lottery.

Also, use and care of your hard drive is important to its longevity. When choosing a drive consider how you’ll use it, 2.5" drives tend to be built more sturdily than 3.5" drives as 3.5" drives are expected to live in a desktop computer and not move around much. If you’re going to be carrying this thing around a whole lot, look for a smaller model meant for portable use. In actual use, there are some important things to consider that will extend the longevity of your drive. Locate your drive in a well-ventilated location, away from heat sources, out of the sun, and keep it free from dust. If possible, keep it in a room where pets aren’t allowed as they’re one of the biggest contributors to household dust and there’s always the possibility of the drive being knocked down and damaged. Heat is the enemy of electronic devices and will inevitable lead to their early demise, dust coats electronics and creates a form of insulation putting the devices further at risk. Finally and contrary to what you might think, unplugging your external hard drive when you’re not using it isn’t necessarily good for it. Damage to a drive is most likely to occur at initial spin-up. When plugged in, even when not in use, the hard drive keeps spinning at low speed.

@sligett Thanks for that link. I had forgotten about asking before. Sorry about that. I had nearly purchased a replacement back then and then had to spend the money on something that had to have higher priority. As a result my work around was to use the drive I used to haul files around with me as the “new” back up drive and just rely on flash drives to carry around. I’ll go back and read that thread again since it is only 7 or so months old and likely nothing important has changed in the meantime.

@Kidsandliz I don’t know if anything has changed recently in the world of hard drives - I used to watch such things closely, but that was in a different life. I do see that newegg has a relative to the drive suggested above available as a shell shocker deal today.

With the old and new comments, I hope you are able to get yourself a new backup drive this time. Good luck!

@sligett @Kidsandliz I literally sat here for 10 minutes reading posts up from the bottom trying to figure out what had resulted in that thread being dredged up from the past again before realizing that this was a new one! xD

The HDD world is pretty stagnant these days with most meaningful refinements coming in the SSD space.

+1. Pre-made external drive cases usually have only passive ventilation and possibly flimsy connections. A real case with cooling fan plus a quality drive would be optimal.

Also the next post down about replacing the drive in your current enclosure is not a bad idea. It seems it lasted a while and an internal drive will be the cheapest solution. https://m.newegg.com/products/9SIA5AD1P08389 could be a good candidate, assuming your current drive was a sata drive. HGST (Hitachi) drives have a good reputation for longevity with high MTBF ratings.

You might also check the ac adapter on your current unit unless you know for sure it’s a drive issue. On a lot of consumer electronics the ac adapter is the first thing to go.

@djslack @thismyusername @nogoodwithnames I now have two enclosures with 2 hard drives that don’t work. Is there an easy way to tell if the problem is the actual drive disk thing vs something else not so replaceable?

@Kidsandliz if they are desktop enclosures that do nothing at all and you have a spare ac adapter that matches (voltage, tip size, polarity should match, current should be at least the original adapter’s rating or more) you can try that.

If you have (or know someone who has) an external sata dock laying around, or a desktop pc and an extra sata cable (hint: the optical drive should have one you can pull and use), you can pull the drives and hook them up and see if they work without the enclosure. It’s probably not worth buying a dock since the point is to be a budget project, but this would 100% verify whether the drives work or not, assuming these enclosures have sata drives. I’ve seen 2.5" drives that have usb interfaces built directly on the drive rather than into the enclosure where this tactic would not help.

Also, if you can hear the drives either trying and failing to spin up or knocking when powered up, then it’s most likely the drive itself that’s toast.

@djslack Actually since I sill have the other broken one in a box, I could swap out the disks and see what happens. If I get really lucky I might get a working drive out of it. Anything important I should know doing this? I know from making one working G3 laptop from two broken ones some years ago, things seemed pretty straightforward, the bigger problem was remembering how I took it apart to put it back together again (after the 3rd, and successful, try I only had two screws left over - oops - which fortunately didn’t seem to matter LOL).

@Kidsandliz If none of the parts are broken, and the enclosure accepts SATA drives, you shouldn’t have any problems swapping drives.

@nogoodwithnames Wondering if it’s the other way around… when @Kidsandliz says it won’t boot, is that the computer not booting from the drive, or the drive just acting all wackadoo and not making it to the point where it mounts? At that point it could be a failed drive or a failed enclosure.

@brhfl drive is not “booting” in the sense that you attach it, it doesn’t spin and the computer doesn’t see it. Don’t know if “boot” is exactly the right word or not.

@Kidsandliz
Yep we’d call that “not spinning up”, but hard to say if it’s the enclosure or the internal drive that’s shot.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to open it and extract the actual drive, which can usually be plugged into a computer with a SATA port.
(Some compact external enclosures use drives with special purpose circuit boards instead of standard desktop/laptop drives inside so this doesn’t always work).

If you have a multimeter you can test the 5V (and occasionally 3.3V) lines on the enclosure’s internal power connector, which usually rules out the enclosure.

A common component on the drive to check for failure if it doesn’t power on are TVS (Zener) diodes, which look like one or two very small black boxes on the surface of the circuit board. I’ve salvaged drives by removing visibly scorched ones (they close a circuit when they burn out, like the opposite of a fuse).

@brhfl Thanks.

@RedOak Of course- if you are prepared bad things don’t happen - right? LOL. And fortunately no dogs, just cats : )

@Kidsandliz best kind of insurance - the kind you don’t use. No fun to have a catastrophic crash since it happens at the absolute worst time.

@InnocuousFarmer Don’t think any of my data is worth that much. I have put taxes, research crap and photos on a flash drive too.

@Kidsandliz I wasn’t too seriously suggesting the checksumming. It is a great feature to have on a file system though… sigh.

Very serious about Backblaze though. Paid monthly, one year is probably less than the cost of a decent drive. It’s a flat $5/mo. It’s what I’ve got my parents using, and they like it, whenever they remember it’s there. It’s great to have an approach of “grab everything, all the time”, optionally with your files available from their website, backup source computer not required.

@InnocuousFarmer @Kidsandliz HIGHLY SUGGEST BACKBLAZE!!!

I went with CrashPlan for $5/mo unlimited backups per computer, which is perfect since we have a single computer that handles terabytes of network storage. I had already set up Syncthing to sync our laptops and phones to it (which is really nice free software I highly recommend).

(CrashPlan also supports multiple operating systems, and against all odds has a client for Solaris/illumos, which is what my storage system actually runs).

I worked for a data storage company for years and am very familiar with just how unreliable hard drives are. Always keep backups, preferably at another location.

@trisk I run CrashPlan too, similar centralized file computer. It’s ZFS for Linux, in my case. (And blessed rsync to shuffle files around.)

I like the Backblaze client more, for someone who’s got just the one Mac or whatever.

@Collin1000
Yikes, with that many drives it is definitely better to have them plugged into a little computer on the network.

That lets you combine their storage capacity, with some redundancy to repair data corruption and cover when one of them eventually fails. Then you can also do automated backups without having to plug anything in.

(Though I would’ve gone with a box/enclosure full of internal drives to start, as USB is bad at handling errors).

@trisk The only reason they aren’t networked is because networked storage is the one thing that Backblaze doesn’t backup.

@Collin1000 Right, my suggestion would be share the storage on the network using a computer your drives are directly connected to. Then you can also use that computer to run the remote backup client, while backing up other devices to it (which is what I do).