External Hard Drive Recommendation for 2020 Macbook Air on Catalina 10.15.7

[bzgnyc2]

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.

I would say that is the way it is supposed to be and generally true but there are some caveats:
-Agree all HDD that I know will work with any macOS from the past 10+ years and almost certainly any commercially-backed/packaged USB product should be fine
-Some combinations of large HDD and the USB/SATA chipsets used in some external enclosures don't work under macOS due to 512e/4Kn issues (I blame the chipset in the case I know)
-Agree HFS+ is much better for HDD but understand Apple support for HFS+ may taper off by 2030 (and will certainly end by 2040)
-Some NVMe SSD connected over TB3+/USB4+ have trouble with TRIM support (e.g. Samsung 980 Pro and 990 Pro) especially Ventura+; also some issues reported with crashes due to MMIO errors (e.g. WD SN850x) -- it's unclear to me at the moment if this is only an issue when they are used as a boot drive
-Unclear about TRIM on NVMe drives connected via USB3

My general recommendation for those not into the engineering of it all is to go with proven combinations or commercially-backed products. Avoid manufacturers' software (to the point if that is required for the device to operate correctly then I would return the device). Minimum OS version requirements on HDD/SSD are almost never requirements and take with a grain of salt.

 

[MacMorrison]

The TRIM and SSD discussions are a subject for another thread.

But yes, stick with hard drives that other macOS users buy for maximum compatibility. I've never run into a problem connecting hard drives to Macs with USB to SATA and PATA bridges or commercial external hard drive products.

Hard drives started going from 512 to 4K sectors in 2010, and Apple officially added native 4K hard drive support in Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan in 2015 - I think official Apple products were probably still using 512 or 512e emulation before then.