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external HD best suited for mac

S

SR 7

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 30, 2009
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I was looking to purchase the WD My Passport Ultra Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive, 1TB to back up my current mac and possibly for extra storage incase I upgrade my macbook but read a few reviews where people had issues with the 3.0?

can anyone chime in on this HD or recommend a better one if there is one better?
 
there is a Mac version? where did you get it from and how much if you don't mind ?
 
SR 7 said:
I was looking to purchase the WD My Passport Ultra Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive, 1TB to back up my current mac and possibly for extra storage incase I upgrade my macbook but read a few reviews where people had issues with the 3.0?

can anyone chime in on this HD or recommend a better one if there is one better?
Click to expand...
A hard drive's a hard drive.

Pick one that fits your needs and budget and has a good warranty.

BTW there is no such thing as "For Mac" hard drives, that's just a sticker meant to milk more money out of people who don't know better. Go ahead a buy one for Windows, all it'll need is a quick format and you'll be good to go.
 
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SR 7 said:
I was looking to purchase the WD My Passport Ultra Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive, 1TB to back up my current mac and possibly for extra storage incase I upgrade my macbook but read a few reviews where people had issues with the 3.0?

can anyone chime in on this HD or recommend a better one if there is one better?
Click to expand...

I have a WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 HD I bought three years ago which I use as my Time Machine back up and it has always worked just fine. I think there is a newer version now though.
 
snaky69 said:
A hard drive's a hard drive.

Pick one that fits your needs and budget and has a good warranty.

BTW there is no such thing as "For Mac" hard drives, that's just a sticker meant to milk more money out of people who don't know better. Go ahead a buy one for Windows, all it'll need is a quick format and you'll be good to go.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily so. I have the Mac specific version of the WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 HD and I didn't pay anymore for it then the Windows PC version. The good thing was it was already formatted for Mac. I certainly don't fall in your "Don't know any better category" and certainly wasn't "Milked out of more money" as you put it. If it was more expensive I would have bought the Windows PC version and formatted it myself.
 
snaky69 said:
A hard drive's a hard drive.

Pick one that fits your needs and budget and has a good warranty.

BTW there is no such thing as "For Mac" hard drives, that's just a sticker meant to milk more money out of people who don't know better. Go ahead a buy one for Windows, all it'll need is a quick format and you'll be good to go.
Click to expand...
 
I know the difference I got mine brand new 2tb mac wd passport for 50 bucks all I had to do was plug it in and it also matched my mac as well grabbing one for Windows would of been a dumber choice as the 2tb was a better deal and the only thing was milked was me later that night..
 
Roadking714 said:
I know the difference I got mine brand new 2tb mac wd passport for 50 bucks all I had to do was plug it in and it also matched my mac as well grabbing one for Windows would of been a dumber choice as the 2tb was a better deal and the only thing was milked was me later that night..
Click to expand...


I lol'd

But generally the "for Apple products sticker" is used to some how justify exorbant pricing. That doesn't mean it might be on sale for a lower price that a tech savvy person would recognize the versatility of the "apple only" product.

I wanted a USB car charger for my iPhone and all the obvious products were $20-30. While a Sony PS Vita car charger was <$4.00.

The small profile of the lightning USB cable still fit into the proprietary Vita charger. (Careful with voltage and ampere ratings, though.)
 
Mr.C said:
Not necessarily so. I have the Mac specific version of the WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 HD and I didn't pay anymore for it then the Windows PC version. The good thing was it was already formatted for Mac. I certainly don't fall in your "Don't know any better category" and certainly wasn't "Milked out of more money" as you put it. If it was more expensive I would have bought the Windows PC version and formatted it myself.
Click to expand...
It was a broad generalization.

In my part of the world the "For Mac" sticker seems to nearly always carry a premium along with it. For example, I've seen it done on Kingston RAM, where both packages were identical, the SKU was the same, the SO-DIMMS were identical down to the very last printed character on every single chip. The price difference was either $10 or $15. The only physical difference? The cardboard inside the package said "Mac Compatible".

Good thing it wasn't the case for you, that business practice is downright shady IMO.
 
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SR 7 said:
I was looking to purchase the WD My Passport Ultra Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive, 1TB to back up my current mac and possibly for extra storage incase I upgrade my macbook but read a few reviews where people had issues with the 3.0?

can anyone chime in on this HD or recommend a better one if there is one better?
Click to expand...
Any external drive that isn't a Seagate will do.

Better still, get a drive that supports UASP. Personally, I wouldn't buy any prepackaged external drives like the WD MyPassport ones, because they only support the BOT protocol.

Myself, I just buy a stack of enclosures that use a UASP controller (like the ASMT 2105) and then buy naked hard drives like the WD Scorpio Black to stick into the enclosures. I get far better random I/O that way using UASP enclosures.
 
yjchua95 said:
Any external drive that isn't a Seagate will do.

Better still, get a drive that supports UASP. Personally, I wouldn't buy any prepackaged external drives like the WD MyPassport ones, because they only support the BOT protocol.

Myself, I just buy a stack of enclosures that use a UASP controller (like the ASMT 2105) and then buy naked hard drives like the WD Scorpio Black to stick into the enclosures. I get far better random I/O that way using UASP enclosures.
Click to expand...

Actually the Mac version was about $10 more expensive then the other version that comes in windows format. I bought one in the past and formatted it for my mac but now my HD is bigger than that storage drive I have so I can't do my back up anymore as a bigger one is needed.

The "mac' version said it was compatible with time machine but if I recall, so is the windows one once you format it for Mac.
 
also, if i use the HD for time machine back up, i won't be able to also use it as extra storage right since it is now backed up to be a bootable or whatever?
 
You could partition it
SR 7 said:
also, if i use the HD for time machine back up, i won't be able to also use it as extra storage right since it is now backed up to be a bootable or whatever?
Click to expand...
You could partition the drive. Point the time machine back up to one partition and have the rest as an external drive.
 
snaky69 said:
You could partition it

You could partition the drive. Point the time machine back up to one partition and have the rest as an external drive.
Click to expand...

Personally, I think it's a terrible idea to partition a drive and use one partition for Time Machine and the rest of the space as extra space for data because you then have no backup of the extra data, since they reside on the same drive as the Time Machine backup. One failure and you've lost both the Time Machine backup and the extra data.
 
matreya said:
Personally, I think it's a terrible idea to partition a drive and use one partition for Time Machine and the rest of the space as extra space for data because you then have no backup of the extra data, since they reside on the same drive as the Time Machine backup. One failure and you've lost both the Time Machine backup and the extra data.
Click to expand...
Completely true. But if OP is wanting to use the hard drive that way one could assume he/she means to use the second partition as a means of transporting data rather than actually storing it.

OP, as mentioned by matreya, never keep only one copy of data you consider valuable, especially not on a mechanical hard drive which will be lugged around.
 
snaky69 said:
Completely true. But if OP is wanting to use the hard drive that way one could assume he/she means to use the second partition as a means of transporting data rather than actually storing it.

OP, as mentioned by matreya, never keep only one copy of data you consider valuable, especially not on a mechanical hard drive which will be lugged around.
Click to expand...

I am thinking i will use the 1tb as the time machine and my old 320 that has extra junk on it that i used for storage as my primary storage drive then.

I bought the 320 as my primary but one thing i learned is when i backed up 250+ gb of data on it and came back to do another back up months later i needed much more space on the external so i could do the overwrite even though my actual HD wasn't over what the back up was. I guess it needed extra space to be able to over wright it so 1TB would be ideal to prevent this scenario as I doubt i will have over 320gb of data to store and combining with what my mac has (200gb) than i should be fine. thats over 520gb of space to use.
 
It might help if you noted what Mac you're using. On the newer laptops, I found USB3 to be nothing but a headache with improper ejects, failure to remount and not showing up in DU. I switched all my drives over to Thunderbolt just for a seamless experience. OWC has a bus driven Thunderbolt portable drive if that's what you're looking for.
 
I am on a late 08' MacBook.

I picked up the My Passport 3.0/2.0 1TB

I am sure my 08' is on a 2.0 and not 3.0 so even though the HD is 3.0/2.0 i expect 2.0 performance if I am not mistaken.
 
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