external storage for iMac 2015 - advice needed

[sciuro]

Hi all,
I have a late 2015 iMac that I am pretty happy with. I use it for processing my photos a lot and my workflow is to keep the Lightroom catalog on internal SSD, the original photo files on an external 3TB WD drive (My Book Essential, the one with external power), and back up both of those to a Synology RAID station. So far, so good.

The problem is that my WD drive (USB3) doesn't connect every other time... If I restart, it often falls offline, and it takes me to switch it to a different USB port and probably power cycle it to get the system find it. Once in a while, the Synology utility has problems finding it even when it's connected. Moving massive data loads to/from the WD drive can also freeze the whole thing. It's all extremely annoying.The drive is ~6 years old and it's probably time to go for it. I am sick of this plug-unplug-plug game... so I want to shop for a new one.

However, I see a lot of similar complaints all across the board and it looks like some specific external HD models are prone to this type of behavior (esp on the Mac). I had problems pretty much from day 1, so it is not a new issue but something people just live with... and I don't want.
Could you folks recommend me a specific external HD setup you are happily using with your Mac?

Thanks a lot!

 

[driftless]

A suggestion: go to System Preference - Power Saver and make sure "Put disks to sleep" is unchecked.

6 yoa is tool old for a spinning disk, time to replace it.

 

[sciuro]

A suggestion: go to System Preference - Power Saver and make sure "Put disks to sleep" is unchecked.

6 yoa is tool old for a spinning disk, time to replace it.

Oh that's been done years ago, but thanks for reiteration.
I am ready to replace it, just figuring out what to get.

 

[Clix Pix]

Samsung external SSD drive, T3......or if you want to wait a little, their soon-to-come T5. It is anticipated, though, that once the T5 is available on the market that the prices of the various-capacity T3 SSD drives will go down......

I use several external drives with my rMBP 2015 15", but I don't leave them plugged into the machine all the time. I plug in, do whatever it is I need to do and then unplug. I use my external drives for backup and supplementary drives, which works well with my 512 SSD in the machine itself.

 

[sciuro]

2TB T3 is $799 and not even enough for my needs. I think I'd go with a spinning disk for now...

 

[Clix Pix]

There is a new Samsung external drive, T5, coming out soon, and while some of us were hoping that it would be larger in capacity, say, 3 TB or 4 TB, so far that doesn't seem to be the case.

In the meantime, since 2015 I have been using the 2 TB T3 (actually, a couple of them for redundancy purposes) as backup drives and also as supplemental drives to the 512 GB SSD internal drive that is in my rMBP. I also have a couple of external spinner drives as well. I was going from a 1 TB "spinner" drive in the 2012 iMac and, yes, it took me some some to strategize and fully work out things, but I found that it is quite doable and I was actually surprised at how many documents, photos and other stuff that I had been keeping on the 1 TB internal spinner that I really did not need to have on hand at every moment after all....

A good mobile external HD with spinner drive is the G-Drive Mobile drive, which I bought with the USB-C and USB-A cables so that I can use it with either my "legacy" ports in my older machines or with the USB-C MacBook. I think it only comes in 1 TB, though. Seagate puts out 4, 5 and maybe even 6 TB external drives as their desktop versions at a reasonable cost, and also they offer some rather colorful mobile drives (Orange, Yellow, Blue, etc.) in up to 4 TB.

 

[dantracht]

STAY AWAY from Seagate and Western Digital.

 

[driftless]

LaCie's Porsche Design single drive spinners are nice. We have a couple. They unmount occasionally but not when being used.

Edit: both LaCie and G-Technology have nice 2 bay RAID drives as well.

 

[Taz Mangus]

STAY AWAY from Seagate and Western Digital.

HGST HDs are good.