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2 x External HD

B

bslarch

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 16, 2018
22
13
Dear all,

Im looking for suggestions of 2 external hard drives for my soon to be purchased iMac Pro.

One I plan to keep documents on that I regularly access (but less frequent than the ones that will be on the main internal drive). One will be used strictly for backups.

Im thinking the first one should be a faster drive, and possibly connect via thunderbolt rather than regular USB, while the second one can be “slower” / not as expensive since it is just used for backup.

The first should likely be between 1 and 2TB, and the second should therefore be around 2 or 3TB.

Let me know what your suggestions are and what you guys are using.

Thanks!
 
WD makes nice little reliable MyPassport models (USB3 bus powered) that I use with the laptop.

For the iMacPro I was considering doing the same thing but ended up with a LaCie 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 RAID Storage. I wanted a bit less clutter and better performance and didn't need the more expensive 4 bay products. It has two hot swap removable drives and can be configured in Raid 1, Raid 0, or individual disks. Also has a SD slot and USB port (I hate reaching around the back to connect portable peripherals and SD cards). I use it in mirror (Raid 1) mode for backup purposes. A nicely put together product that performs well and low cost for what you get.

You may want to check the accessory forum for more ideas.

https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/mac-accessories.77/
 
I use a Best Buy easystore 8TB external drive and carry a 500GB Samsung T5. They're frequently on sale. Both have decent warranties. Both ship with security software for Windows and Macs.

And, there's a bit of secret about that easystore drive, and only the 8TB unit - many of them ship with WD Red NAS drives installed, and those Red drives have a larger cache than the bare Red drive. The remainder of the 8TB easystore drives ship with WD White NAS drives. The only means to determine which drive is inside is to go to a B&M Best Buy and check the SN - there's a long thread about this on SlickDeals. I bought two of these @$149 on sale just to extract the drive (a spudger works perfectly for this), and took out the $239 (retail) Red drive and put them in a dual-drive NAS. A third unit is DAS, attached to my TB3 dock - it's pretty fast IMHO, works perfectly for backups.
 
Hi all,

I received my new iMac Pro yesterday and am now considering to get two external drives.

On my internal drive I would have:
- All programs
- Dropbox
- All of my files for work (3D models, renders, etc.)

External drive 1:
- Texture maps and downloaded 3D models for work
- archived work files no longer needed on the main internal drive
- movies
- iTunes / Spotify

External drive 2:
- backups of both the internal drive and external drive 1

So both the internal drive and the external drive 1 would be used every day, and external drive 2 would ideally create backups once or twice a day.

I'm considering that I would probably want to get an SSD for the external 1, and maybe normal spinning disk would be fine for external 2. Can anyone suggest from personal experience which drives would be best for this kind of work? Connecting through thunderbolt or USB3? I think maybe the drive enclosures and using RAID 0 / 1 might be overkill or unnecessary for me... but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. I'd also prefer not to use the small portable drives (though there seem to be limited options for SSD desktop solutions), and rather have something that sits comfortably behind my computer.

Let me know what products you think would be good for me.
 
Last edited:
not quite the same, but....

my old imac has an SSD as primary then another HDD in the optical bay which has my home folder.

then these two are backed up to an external drive, with time machine.
I will also be using CCC to make backups of my SSD regularly too.
 
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matreya said:
Both excellent choices. I have the T5 which I use to clone my MBP's main drive. I also have a G-tech drive of a different configuration and it is excellent also.
Click to expand...

Good to hear! Just went ahead and ordered these from amazon.

For backups, do you use Time Machine, or something like CarbonCopyCloner?
 
bslarch said:
For backups, do you use Time Machine, or something like CarbonCopyCloner?
Click to expand...

I use both. I clone my system drives on my iMac and MBP to different SSDs, and also use Time Machine with other drives (SSD for iMac and portable HDD for MBP)
 
matreya said:
I use both. I clone my system drives on my iMac and MBP to different SSDs, and also use Time Machine with other drives (SSD for iMac and portable HDD for MBP)
Click to expand...

Did you do any formatting for either of the drives, or was it more "plug and play"? They arrive today (I forgot how quick amazon prime is).
 
yes, I usually format all new drives to HFS+ as a habit. But for the clone of my iMac I formatted the target SSD as APFS Encrypted
 
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