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1TB External Hard Drive Recommendations

S

sdilley14

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 8, 2007
1,242
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Mesa, AZ
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Weaselboy said:
Nope. These USB3 portable drives are all about the same. Just get whatever is cheapest.
Click to expand...

That's pretty much what I figured. And I have no interest in using any of the pre-installed software some of them come with.

I've always had good luck with WD, and that drive is the cheapest. I'll just go that route.

I cannot wait to upgrade to a 3.0 drive from my 2.0 drive. Transferring movies and TV shows on to the drive takes foreverrrr. :S
 
sdilley14 said:
That's pretty much what I figured. And I have no interest in using any of the pre-installed software some of them come with.

I've always had good luck with WD, and that drive is the cheapest. I'll just go that route.

I cannot wait to upgrade to a 3.0 drive from my 2.0 drive. Transferring movies and TV shows on to the drive takes foreverrrr. :S
Click to expand...

I should have mentioned that. I do the same and just format the whole drive first thing right out of the box.
 
Weaselboy said:
I should have mentioned that. I do the same and just format the whole drive first thing right out of the box.
Click to expand...

Yup, that be the plan!

Do you have any simple methods for transferring the content from my old external directly to the new one? I have about 400GB of data I want to transfer over. Unfortunately my MacBook Pro hard drive is only 256GB. So dragging from the old hd onto the MBP then dragging onto the new hd won't exactly be a streamlined process.
 
sdilley14 said:
Yup, that be the plan!

Do you have any simple methods for transferring the content from my old external directly to the new one? I have about 400GB of data I want to transfer over. Unfortunately my MacBook Pro hard drive is only 256GB. So dragging from the old hd onto the MBP then dragging onto the new hd won't exactly be a streamlined process.
Click to expand...

If it is not the OS, and just simple files, you can just drag and drop from one drive to the other in Finder. The files will move "through" your Mac over the USB bus without actually being stored on your internal drive. It will take a while though.
 
Weaselboy said:
If it is not the OS, and just simple files, you can just drag and drop from one drive to the other in Finder. The files will move "through" your Mac over the USB bus without actually being stored on your internal drive. It will take a while though.
Click to expand...

I was wondering if that would be possible.

Fortunately it's just a bunch of movies and TV shows and pictures and things like that. I'm not worried about moving over OS backups or anything like that.

Thanks for the tip!
 
You should know that with the WD drives, the hard drive inside is 'it'. There is no SATA drive with a USB SATA controller; the drive inside is natively USB 3.

For an external drive, I'd recommend you get an internal hard drive like this, and an enclosure like this, and put the hard drive in the enclosure. This way you have a SATA drive that can be swapped out, and you have an enclosure that is designed to be opened. Pre-made external drives that have a SATA drive inside use an enclosure that is not designed to be opened, usually just snapped and/or glued together, and you may damage it if you try to open it.
Getting your own drive and enclosure is also about the same price as a pre-made external drive.

P.S. The internal drive linked is a WD drive with a 'white-label'. It is safe.
 
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