External Hard Drive for MBA

[motrek]

Hello all really appeciate the immediate input and comments, Great forum.

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I am just repeating the terms and language I read in some threads about the issues......I am not a highly tech savvy person. I am just trying to obtain as much information before choosing an external hard drive that works correctly with Yosemite and Time Machine. Here are some examples of the threads I was referring to. But I know, most things that receive posts are about things that go wrong, so it was reassuring to see the responses here from people that didn't have a problem.

http://community.wd.com/t5/External...ook-for-Mac-2TB-and-OS-X-Yosemite/td-p/820017

http://community.wd.com/t5/External...ort-for-Mac-1TB-and-OS-X-Yosemite/td-p/811837

Thanks

Ah okay, I see what's going on. "Smartware" is Western Digital's name for the backup software that they ship on their external drives.

Personally I never use any of the bundled software that comes on these drives. The first thing I do is format them, since they are usually pre-formatted for PCs anyway. That gets rid of any of the bundled software which I have no use for anyway.

I have my own backup system/routine that I'm happy with and I don't need to change it to some software that happened to come with some drive I bought.

Anyway, again, my personal experience is that WD drives work well with Macs and Yosemite. Your mileage may vary obviously. It seems from this thread that some people have issues but personally I've have no problems.

 

[ecschwarz]

That's good that you're thinking about redundancy but I'd be concerned about a RAID1 solution like this one.

Studies have shown that hard drives from the same batch (same make, model, similar manufacture date) often fail at more or less the same time, so you might not have the redundancy that you might think.

Also, if they are both plugged into the same device, they might be damaged/destroyed by the same circumstance, e.g., a power surge from a nearby lightning strike, or a fire, or theft, or something like that.

Or you could get some malware or accidentally delete a file and then that problem is duplicated across drives before you have a chance to resolve it.

Better IMO is to have one drive and back up its contents every week or to to a different drive somewhere else that doesn't stay plugged in.

I actually have an older drive that serves as my off-site backup - I'm a bit paranoid about losing data, so I have a few different versions (Time Machine, Super Duper, etc.) floating around in case of trouble. That being said, I fully agree with your advice overall (the RAID1 is set up right now as a bit of a seeing-what-my-usage-is-before-I-commit-to-any particular configuration). I know I don't want to do RAID0, but I'm torn between RAID1 and using the two drives independently.