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External Hard Drive Recommendation for 2020 Macbook Air on Catalina 10.15.7

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curiousjo

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Original poster
This is my first post ever. If I’m not in the right place, please redirect me. I’m looking for guidance about external hard drives. Please see the details below followed by my questions:

I purchased several Western Digital My Passport for Mac (two 2 TB and two 4 TB), to use as external storage (need to free up space in my hard drive) and also for Time Machine backups (prior external hard drive is full). I knew that they might be slow, but so far they’ve been working ok. No complaints.

I was looking online for whether the WD My Passport would be compatible with Sonoma or Sequoia (should I decide to upgrade my 2020 Macbook Air/Quad-Core Intel Core i5, currently on Catalina 10.15.7, to a more current macOS) and whether they would work with a new Macbook Air M5 (should I decide to purchase a new computer rather than upgrading macOS). That’s when I found reviews that I hadn’t seen before purchase — about the drives failing after several months or a year. I know that people tend to write reviews only when they’ve had a bad experience, and not so much when their experience has been positive, but it did give me pause. I’m not sure how prevalent potential failure problems are with these drives and WD does not offer recovery service...

It’s imperative that I:
1) Be able to reliably access the data on these external drives
2) Be able to move the data back onto a Macbook Air (current laptop or new)
3) Know that they will continue to work. (Some of the data is now ONLY on the WD and then backed up to a second WD.)

Given the above my questions are:
1) Do I need to return the 2 I recently bought and “diversify” to another brand? It was hard finding something that would work on my laptop and would still work with either a newer macOS or new Macbook Air. Thus my choice of WD My Passport for Mac. The Lacie’s Rugged Portable and the Mobile Device Secure looked promising but they required macOS 12 or higher. I didn’t find anything else that would work.
2) If I do need to diversity, does anyone have recommendations on reliable hard drives that will work with Catalina and 2020 Macbook Air hardware?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, suggestions, ideas you may have.
 
Everymac.com is an excellent resource for checking out specifications of almost any mac ever made. I think this is the one you have.
2020 Macbook Air

According to the everymac specs, your mac has two thunderbolt3/USB-C ports that if connected to Thunderbolt drives can handle up to 40gigabits per second, which translates to ~2800MB/s read/write speed.

The WD drives you have are most probably USB3.0, and gives a real world performance of up to ~400MB/s. Just so you know. If you don't really need the fast speeds of thunderbolt on external drives, USB3.0 is fine.

To your questions:
Reading about drives failing - do not pay attention to those reports. SSDs are extremely reliable and you can expect them to last for many years, if not decades. Most problem reports results from user error or incompatibilities.
No, you don't need to diversify.

About Time Machine:
How often do you need to enter TM to restore deleted files. Ever?
If you don't need to recover files on a regular basis (most people don't) then you should consider a different solution for backing up. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, and it makes it easy to create backups that are kept for a limited time, and then discarded. TM is often the cause of people seeing drives fill up.

When you find a good alternative to TM, just turn TM off, and erase the old TM backup drive.

Oh, and you can just use slow, inexpensive drives for backups.

In the end, you just might find that all you need is TM disabled on your system drive to free up space, plus an external 1-2TB drive for backups.
 
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curiousjo said:
Thanks I will check that out, though I forgot to mention that I'd prefer to NOT backup to the cloud...
Click to expand...
For files you absolutely can't ever imagine losing, your backup routine should include taking a backup set off site. The frequency should be as often as you are comfortable losing data since the last backup set taken offsite. Hence, I prefer to simplify this by using the cloud. MS365 Personal is $99/year (there are frequent discounts) and includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. Arq lets you pick the files you want to backup, does incremental backups on a schedule you set, and can use OneDrive as a backup location.
 
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Perhaps repeating myself, but to recap:
If you have a 512GB internal SSD. SSDs should never be filled up more than 80%. So let's say you have ~400GB on your internal. If you want to have a full external backup that keeps deleted files from everyday the last couple of weeks, plus weekly from the last couple of months, that would typically amount to 400GB (copy of all the data on your internal drive now) + 200GB of files that can be restored. So, a 1TB SSD for backup should suffice.
 
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Ben J. said:
Everymac.com is an excellent resource for checking out specifications of almost any mac ever made. I think this is the one you have.
2020 Macbook Air

According to the everymac specs, your mac has two thunderbolt3/USB-C ports that if connected to Thunderbolt drives can handle up to 40gigabits per second, which translates to ~2800MB/s read/write speed.

The WD drives you have are most probably USB3.0, and gives a real world performance of up to ~400MB/s. Just so you know. If you don't really need the fast speeds of thunderbolt on external drives, USB3.0 is fine.

To your questions:
Reading about drives failing - do not pay attention to those reports. SSDs are extremely reliable and you can expect them to last for many years, if not decades. Most problem reports results from user error or incompatibilities.
No, you don't need to diversify.

About Time Machine:
How often do you need to enter TM to restore deleted files. Ever?
If you don't need to recover files on a regular basis (most people don't) then you should consider a different solution for backing up. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, and it makes it easy to create backups that are kept for a limited time, and then discarded. TM is often the cause of people seeing drives fill up.

When you find a good alternative to TM, just turn TM off, and erase the old TM backup drive.

Oh, and you can just use slow, inexpensive drives for backups.

In the end, you just might find that all you need is TM disabled on your system drive to free up space, plus an external 1-2TB drive for backups.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the spec site tip. Was not familiar with that site and it looks very helpful. The WD drives are HDD not SSD, with a transfer rate of up to 5 GB/s. So not sure if/how that might influence your reply?

I had looked at Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper as options. How often do you do you Carbon Copy "backup" and how long does it take? (Right now I do a TM backup once a week.)

My laptop storage (1 TB) is 3/4 full due to videos and photos, but also general files. TM back ups are to the WD drive not to my Macbook hard drive. Having just bought a new 2TB WD, I'm okay on TM back up space for now. (If I forget I have it plugged in, I do need to delete the multiple backup copies as it backs up every hour I believe. Not a biggie, just have to remember to unplug.). The biggest challenge was how long encrypting the WD took - 10 days using TM encryption. Yeah, I know, I'll try Disk Utility next time and see if it's faster...)

Thanks again.
 
curiousjo said:
The WD drives are HDD not SSD, with a transfer rate of up to 5 GB/s. So not sure if/how that might influence your reply?
Click to expand...
SSD or HDD makes little difference, if any. You can mix SSDs and HDDs on your system.

File system on HDDs:
As long as you're still on Catalina, Apple recommends HFS+:

File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, format disks or volumes using Apple File System (APFS), Mac OS Extended, MS-DOS (FAT), and ExFAT.
support.apple.com support.apple.com
Even if you upgrade macOS, it's generally recommended that HDD are formatted with HFS+, because it's designed for HDDs, and APFS is designed for SSDs.

Manage drives and file system formatting in Disk Utility. Also know that you don't need to use encryption at all. In my decades of using macs, I never used encryption.

curiousjo said:
How often do you do you Carbon Copy "backup" and how long does it take? (Right now I do a TM backup once a week.)
Click to expand...
I prefer to have it run every night at 1AM. I keep my mac running 24/7. The idea is that if I should dig myself into a hole by installing bad software, accidentally deleting files, messing up stuff etc, I can always restore the exact state of one or more of my drives to how they looked last night.

Not sure about Time Machine, but CCC and SD types of cloning software simply copies the files that are new or has been changed, so for me with fast SSDs, it takes often less than a minute.
 
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Ben J. said:
Regarding 'drive/macOS comptibility'; most any drive will work with any combination of macOS version and Mac model.
Click to expand...

Ben J. said:
SSD or HDD makes little difference, if any. You can mix SSDs and HDDs on your system.

File system on HDDs:
As long as you're still on Catalina, Apple recommends HFS+:

File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, format disks or volumes using Apple File System (APFS), Mac OS Extended, MS-DOS (FAT), and ExFAT.
support.apple.com support.apple.com
Even if you upgrade macOS, it's generally recommended that HDD are formatted with HFS+, because it's designed for HDDs, and APFS is designed for SSDs.

Manage drives and file system formatting in Disk Utility. Also know that you don't need to use encryption at all. In my decades of using macs, I never used encryption.


I prefer to have it run every night at 1AM. I keep my mac running 24/7. The idea is that if I should dig myself into a hole by installing bad software, accidentally deleting files, messing up stuff etc, I can always restore the exact state of one or more of my drives to how they looked last night.

Not sure about Time Machine, but CCC and SD types of cloning software simply copies the files that are new or has been changed, so for me with fast SSDs, it takes often less than a minute.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your thoughts, much appreciated.

Yep using Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for formatting and will try Disk Utility if I decide to encrypt the next HD. I'm only encrypting when I've backing up sensitive stuff, otherwise no encryption.

It's my understanding that after the initial TM backup, subsequent TM is only backing up what's changed. Assuming that's how you're using Carbon Copy -- scheduling it to run each night and only capturing what's changed.

Thanks again.
 
I resisted cloud backups for a long time. Eventually, though, I had to bow to the reality that single (or even two) drive backups weren't going to cut it in a fire or other disaster. I've been using a cloud backup service (Backblaze) for a couple years now. I still do local backups for simple file recovery in the near term. The cloud backup is the disaster recovery backup.

As for hard drive reliability, there are only 3 significant makers of the actual drive mechanisms left (Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital). I don't think you can associate reliability with a brand any more.
 
I was doing a little research on portable hard drives and The Wirecutter (The New York Times) seemed to show a 4TB Toshiba drive performing file transfers a bit more quickly in their last roundup (the table "Real-world file transfers, in minutes"):

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-external-hard-drives/

There was some recent news that Western Digital had sold out of the year's production runs of their hard drives already due to AI and data center demand - that probably pertained to their enterprise products more than consumer hard drives, but you might notice the bigger hard drives are getting scarce in the supply chain.

Re: hard drive reliability - I think all three vendors are pretty similar in reliability, with some of the hard drive horror stories being anecdotal at best. Make sure to have multiple backups and preferably an off-site backup (cloud or otherwise) in case of disaster. Relying on the manufacturer warranty is a poor plan in the event of hardware failure and data loss - use Time Machine or 3rd-party apps like Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, and ChronoSync to stay backed up.

On the simplest level, every hard drive should be compatible with a 2020 MacBook Air on macOS 10.15 Catalina, it's just a question of whether it is formatted for HFS+/APFS from the box or whether you need to use Disk Utility to re-format it from a PC format (FAT/ExFAT/NTFS). You should check whether the hard drive has a USB-C connector so that you won't need a USB-A to C adapter or cable.
 
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curiousjo said:
This is my first post ever. If I’m not in the right place, please redirect me. I’m looking for guidance about external hard drives. Please see the details below followed by my questions:

I purchased several Western Digital My Passport for Mac (two 2 TB and two 4 TB), to use as external storage (need to free up space in my hard drive) and also for Time Machine backups (prior external hard drive is full). I knew that they might be slow, but so far they’ve been working ok. No complaints.

I was looking online for whether the WD My Passport would be compatible with Sonoma or Sequoia (should I decide to upgrade my 2020 Macbook Air/Quad-Core Intel Core i5, currently on Catalina 10.15.7, to a more current macOS) and whether they would work with a new Macbook Air M5 (should I decide to purchase a new computer rather than upgrading macOS). That’s when I found reviews that I hadn’t seen before purchase — about the drives failing after several months or a year. I know that people tend to write reviews only when they’ve had a bad experience, and not so much when their experience has been positive, but it did give me pause. I’m not sure how prevalent potential failure problems are with these drives and WD does not offer recovery service...

It’s imperative that I:
1) Be able to reliably access the data on these external drives
2) Be able to move the data back onto a Macbook Air (current laptop or new)
3) Know that they will continue to work. (Some of the data is now ONLY on the WD and then backed up to a second WD.)

Given the above my questions are:
1) Do I need to return the 2 I recently bought and “diversify” to another brand? It was hard finding something that would work on my laptop and would still work with either a newer macOS or new Macbook Air. Thus my choice of WD My Passport for Mac. The Lacie’s Rugged Portable and the Mobile Device Secure looked promising but they required macOS 12 or higher. I didn’t find anything else that would work.
2) If I do need to diversity, does anyone have recommendations on reliable hard drives that will work with Catalina and 2020 Macbook Air hardware?
Click to expand...

I have that model of MacBook and still an affinity for running Catalina on it (note if you don't update to Sonoma or Sequoia, you may want to at least update to 10.15.8 before next January). It's been solid for me.

Then in addition to all the other helpful advice from others here, I want to add one other suggestion: I do not recommend traveling or carrying around HDD. Even if they call themselves rugged, portable or whatever. If you do need carry at least one copy of your data on an external device, I recommend an SSD.

If you are leaving those HDD on a desk that you dock with to do the backups/archives/etc then you should be fine continuing with HDD.

The one thing to be on the lookout for with HDD is early signs of failure. Ideally they would tell the OS of their imminent failure and you would get a notification onscreen (the one popup I would actually appreciate). In theory that's possible but I rarely see it working. More typically you'll hear strange noises (grinding, clicking, etc) and/or get poor performance (sometimes going into a "limp mode" as in a car that will run just well enough for you to limp home but in this case there's no check engine light to make it clear this should be your last trip with the drive).

Last, all these devices tend to have "bathtub" reliability curves. They typically fail within the first 3-6 months or they last for years. Which can be 10+ years on an enterprise drive even if the max warranty is 5 years. Even the cheaper HDD will often go 3-5 years if handled gently.
 
MacMorrison said:
I was doing a little research on portable hard drives and The Wirecutter (The New York Times) seemed to show a 4TB Toshiba drive performing file transfers a bit more quickly in their last roundup (the table "Real-world file transfers, in minutes"):

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-external-hard-drives/

There was some recent news that Western Digital had sold out of the year's production runs of their hard drives already due to AI and data center demand - that probably pertained to their enterprise products more than consumer hard drives, but you might notice the bigger hard drives are getting scarce in the supply chain.

Re: hard drive reliability - I think all three vendors are pretty similar in reliability, with some of the hard drive horror stories being anecdotal at best. Make sure to have multiple backups and preferably an off-site backup (cloud or otherwise) in case of disaster. Relying on the manufacturer warranty is a poor plan in the event of hardware failure and data loss - use Time Machine or 3rd-party apps like Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, and ChronoSync to stay backed up.

On the simplest level, every hard drive should be compatible with a 2020 MacBook Air on macOS 10.15 Catalina, it's just a question of whether it is formatted for HFS+/APFS from the box or whether you need to use Disk Utility to re-format it from a PC format (FAT/ExFAT/NTFS). You should check whether the hard drive has a USB-C connector so that you won't need a USB-A to C adapter or cable.
Click to expand...
Whoops didn’t see your comment come in. I had purchased the WD HD based on online research and then afterwards saw the Wirecutter list for the WD Ultra.

So do you mean that with, for example, the La Cie specs saying that macOS version 12+ is required (https://www.seagate.com/support/lacie-os-compatibility/), that the specified system requirement is for the existing software on the drive, and that erasing and then configuring it with Disk Utility will make it usable with Catalina? LaCie offers 2-year data recovery and WD none, which I guess helps justify the higher price...
 
curiousjo said:
Whoops didn’t see your comment come in. I had purchased the WD HD based on online research and then afterwards saw the Wirecutter list for the WD Ultra.

So do you mean that with, for example, the La Cie specs saying that macOS version 12+ is required (https://www.seagate.com/support/lacie-os-compatibility/), that the specified system requirement is for the existing software on the drive, and that erasing and then configuring it with Disk Utility will make it usable with Catalina? LaCie offers 2-year data recovery and WD none, which I guess helps justify the higher price...
Click to expand...

I think LaCie drives are formatted for macOS already (with HFS+ or APFS), so you don't need to erase them - that's partly why they sell at a higher markup, because they are meant for the Mac market. You can just plug them in and use them immediately.
 
curiousjo said:
the LaCie system requirements that I've found (https://www.seagate.com/support/lacie-os-compatibility/) state macOS 12+ is required. Since I'm on an older OS/laptop, are you saying that I can use Disk Utility to erase and reformat and it will work?
Click to expand...
Read that carefully. The macOS 12+ requirement is for the Lacie Toolkit Software. AFAIK, there is no reason to use that software. You can use Disk Utility to erase and reformat.
 
curiousjo said:
You are correct --- I meant to say that I could upgrade to Sonoma or Sequoia, not Tahoe. Thanks for catching that.
Click to expand...
Yes, you should upgrade that computer to Sequoia. Your computer hasn’t had a security update in several years, and security updates for Sonoma end this fall. Sequoia will get another year of updates.
You definitely should have at least one backup of everything on your computer even if you aren’t doing an upgrade to the operating system. The disks you have will work fine on Sequoia but a common mistake I see users make is that they move files to an external disk from the computer’s internal disk and think they’re backed up. Those external disks also need to be backed up or it’s easy to lose the data that’s on an external disk.
 
Yes, every hard drive is the same. You can format a Lacie and use it like any other drive (they are Seagate drives inside). the macOS 12 requirement is only for their software tools.

I recommend formatting hard drives in HFS+ because it has better performance. Apple removed the ability to create new encrypted HFS+ volumes in 2019 with macOS 10.15 Catalina - it's annoying, but not an issue for most people.

APFS was designed for solid state drives. It does work on hard drives but its copy-on-write design writes to new areas on hard drives, which leads to file fragmentation in the long run. There is a higher metadata overhead as well, which is much slower with APFS on hard drives.

Details here:

https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration-performance-on-rotational-hard-drives
 
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Thanks for the course correction -- I had misread and thought that Catalina didn't support HFS+ but it does just squeaking by. Much preferred to APFS file fragmentation. Oh well, next time I reformat the drive. Lesson learned.

And thanks for confirming that the LaCie systems requirement is really just proprietary. (I wonder if they require use of their software in order to potentially provide their data recovery service which would be the reason I'd pay more for that type of drive. Might you know?). I had my suspicion that it was proprietary but not needed but I needed to act quickly in getting a drive so didn't verify. The WD My Passport makes it look like you need their software but I just didn't use it as wasn't looking to password protect the drive.

Appreciate the education all around!
 
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curiousjo said:
Thanks for the course correction -- I had misread and thought that Catalina didn't support HFS+ but it does just squeaking by. Much preferred to APFS file fragmentation. Oh well, next time I reformat the drive. Lesson learned.

And thanks for confirming that the LaCie systems requirement is really just proprietary. (I wonder if they require use of their software in order to potentially provide their data recovery service which would be the reason I'd pay more for that type of drive. Might you know?). I had my suspicion that it was proprietary but not needed but I needed to act quickly in getting a drive so didn't verify. The WD My Passport makes it look like you need their software but I just didn't use it as wasn't looking to password protect the drive.

Appreciate the education all around!
Click to expand...

I didn't go too far down that warranty legalese rabbit hole, but LaCie says in their user manual: "LaCie is not responsible for any data lost due to formatting, partitioning or using a LaCie storage device."

Which sounds pretty unambiguous. Re: data recovery, it would depend on what happened to the drive. If there is some kind of physical failure (like a ton of bad sectors), they won't be able to do much, but if something simpler happens, like a smaller failure (damage to boot areas), the data would have a better chance of recovery.

There are some software tools to rebuild file allocation tables, etc., but it really depends, and real data recovery services are very expensive. You're better off having another copy of the data just in case. Once the data recovery specialists are hired, their time is expensive and they charge a lot to perform surgery on a consumer hard drive (i.e., fixing the actuators, pulling the platters, or something like that).

Password encryption is great for your data security but it can become a problem if the drive gets corrupted or physically damaged re: data recovery. The processing overhead to encrypt a hard drive is fairly negligible for modern computers, but I remember it took FOREVER (more than a day) to decrypt a hard drive I tested once.
 
Don't make this harder than it needs to be; connected to a modern M-series mac, any spinning HDD from any company will work as expected when formatted to HFS+, and any SSD from any company will work as expected when formatted to APFS. And they can be mixed just fine on the same mac. No need for drivers, TRIM or manufacturer's software. Plug - format w/Diskutilities - 'n play.
 
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