5400 portable drives - USB 3.0

[puckhead193]

I need a portable hard drive since i can't take a long my Pegasus 2 R4 on the plane. My problem is that my files are huge. The current project is over 1.5TB and is growing.

The problem is that in order to get large capacity i need a slower drive. How will editing on a 13" rMBP using USB 3 with a 5400 drive...

 

[joema2]

I need a portable hard drive since i can't take a long my Pegasus 2 R4 on the plane. My problem is that my files are huge. The current project is over 1.5TB and is growing.

The problem is that in order to get large capacity i need a slower drive. How will editing on a 13" rMBP using USB 3 with a 5400 drive...

You can get 1TB 7200 rpm USB 3.0 portable drives, e.g, HGST Touro S: https://amzn.com/B00IVFDQ48 It is significantly faster than most similar 5400 rpm drives.

However you are already over 1TB so you need way more than that. Hard drives slow down as they fill up so you need to maintain a fair amount of free space. Even a 2TB drive isn't nearly big enough for you.

IMO the best USB 3.0 bus-powered drive for your situation is the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast: https://amzn.com/B00HXAV0X6

I have several of them and it does about 220 megabytes/sec. Internally it is RAID-0, so that's how it goes so fast.

I also have a Pegasus R4 -- the 4TB portable drive isn't that fast but it's about the fastest you can affordably get in that storage size that is USB 3.0 and bus-powered.

WD has one called the 4TB Passport Pro which is Thunderbolt and bus-powered. However it is no faster than the Seagate and considerably bigger and heavier. It is out of stock in many places so I wonder if it's being replaced: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1240

Lacie has a 4TB bus-powered Thunderbolt drive, also RAID-0, but it's bigger: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1135375-REG/lacie_9000601_4tb_2_x_2tb.html

The main limitation of external USB 3.0 drives is OS X cannot boot from them if over 2TB. So if you will ever be using it for a bootable image backup, this requires Thunderbolt. From a performance standpoint they are as fast as a similar (single) Thunderbolt drive. However Thunderbolt is easier to daisy-chain together, and you can have several drives on a single Thunderbolt bus.

Although most drives are fairly reliable, I suggest always doing a "burn in" test on any new HDD. I usually use either SoftRAID: https://www.softraid.com/pages/features/testing_disks.html

Or DiskTestr: http://diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

DriveDx gets good reviews and is available on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drivedx/id526290112?mt=12

 

[puckhead193]

IMO the best USB 3.0 bus-powered drive for your situation is the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast: https://amzn.com/B00HXAV0X6

I saw this digging around but it said only PC online but as you say it works with Macs!?!? It didn't come up on B&H but when i search for it, it comes up..weird. Going to order it now! Thanks for the advice!! much appreciated!
Puck

 

[AleRod]

Although most drives are fairly reliable, I suggest always doing a "burn in" test on any new HDD. I usually use either SoftRAID: https://www.softraid.com/pages/features/testing_disks.html

Or DiskTestr: http://diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

DriveDx gets good reviews and is available on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drivedx/id526290112?mt=12

@joema2

Your suggestion of the 3 applications to test drives reliability are really interesting. Thank you.

How about Scannerz? http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html
Does Scannerz do the same burn-in test as SoftRAID and DiskTestr do?

Which one of the 3 would you recommend to test new HDD single volumes?

 

[joema2]

@joema2

Your suggestion of the 3 applications to test drives reliability are really interesting. Thank you.

How about Scannerz? http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html
Does Scannerz do the same burn-in test as SoftRAID and DiskTestr do?

Which one of the 3 would you recommend to test new HDD single volumes?

DriveDx doesn't really do surface scanning, it's more of an S.M.A.R.T reporting tool. A significant limitation is on USB drives you must install a 3rd party kernel extension to make it work. They provide details on how to do this.

I have Scannerz, DiskTestR and various other utilities. In general I like Scannerz and DiskTestR. They are both very good, and in general I like them better for pure disk scanning than all-in-one tools like Disk Warrior, Drive Genius and Tech Tools Pro, although I have all those as well. This thread discusses them: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...oftware-creating-the-definitive-list.1544280/

ScannerZ has been around a long time and does a good job of disk scanning to find errors. It is not a repair tool.

DiskTestR is part of diglloydTools, which also includes a memory tester and a file integrity checker. They can be customized and run from the Terminal command line, which is nice: http://diglloydtools.com/download.html

Even though we often just assume new hard drives will be reliable for several years "infant mortality" failures can happen during early usage. Therefore for critical applications it's a good idea to stress test the disk for a few days, or at least a few hours.

Time Machine and Carbon Copy have no backup validation function, so they simply assume the backup is good. You can easily get into a situation where you have a modest (but maybe not fatal) problem on your boot drive, you commit to a full-drive Time Machine recovery, this wipes clean your boot drive prior to a restore, then the restore fails due to a bad block on the Time Machine drive.

It takes more time but it would be safer to do a contingency clone backup before committing to a full Time Machine restore, as if that fails it has wiped out your existing disk and now you can't restore.

The best practice is test all new drives using the above tools and have more than one backup type on different backup disks, such as Time Machine plus Carbon Copy.

 

[AleRod]

@joema2

Thank you very much for your informative reply.
I learned a lot.