Modern External Hard Drives

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

My previous computer is a nearly decade-old late 2015 27" iMac. With it I bought a WD My Book Duo. A full backup to a partition on it took more than 3 hours. Over time I bought a handful of Samsung T3 and T5 SSDs. Everything worked nicely at USB A speeds of up to 300 MB/s.

Recently I got a M4 Mac Mini. It goes like the flamin' clappers. However ---

The old drives, HDD and SSD are now too slow to take advantage of its USB C and Thunderbolt connections. I needed newer, better, faster, shinier hardware. A Crucial X9 Pro is good, solid and reliable, and a Thunderbolt dock and WD Blue M.2 NVMe 2TB drive provides speeds as good as the internal SSD.

But I still needed an external HDD that was cost-effective, and wasn't embarrassingly slow. Enter a WD Blue drive with 256 MB cache. I found that these drive could write over 300 GB worth of files at 200 MB/sec continuously without slowing down. As well, a full backup of the M4 Mac Mini took about 50 minutes, compared to the same size backup taking over 3 hours on the iMac. Regular hourly backups are done in a few minutes.

2TB WD Blue drives are currently going for about AU$108 and their 4TB siblings for about AU$140. These drives are much faster, and much, much cheaper than HDDs of only a few years ago. They are ideal for fast backups and long-term archival.

 

[Boyd01]

I have a pair of 8tb WD Black external USB 3 drives that I use for archival storage of large geodata files (both are almost full). Never thought to benchmark them but just ran the Blackmagic test and they clock about 240 MB/sec R/W on my 2018 (i7 Intel) Mini which seems pretty good. Didn't do any research on these, just needed disk space in a hurry and got them at a local WalMart.

 

[!!!]

Enter a WD Blue drive with 256 MB cache. I found that these drive could write over 300 GB worth of files at 200 MB/sec continuously without slowing down. As well, a full backup of the M4 Mac Mini took about 50 minutes, compared to the same size backup taking over 3 hours on the iMac. Regular hourly backups are done in a few minutes.

2TB WD Blue drives are currently going for about AU$108 and their 4TB siblings for about AU$140. These drives are much faster, and much, much cheaper than HDDs of only a few years ago. They are ideal for fast backups and long-term archival.

I hate to burst your bubble but the WD drives that are less than 8TB and have 256MB of cache are SMR drives. If you write to the entire drive at least once (and TM will do that) your speeds will drop precipitously, somewhere around 10MB/s for the 4TB and about 2MB/s for the 2TB. There's a reason why they're so cheap.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I hate to burst your bubble but the WD drives that are less than 8TB and have 256MB of cache are SMR drives. If you write to the entire drive at least once (and TM will do that) your speeds will drop precipitously, somewhere around 10MB/s for the 4TB and about 2MB/s for the 2TB. There's a reason why they're so cheap.

I had previously bought a 2TB WD Blue with 256MB Cache that is definitely SMR, and behaves like it. Goes like the clapper (R/W @ 250 MB/s for a while, then slows right down). Also the WD Blue drives that are SMR are all 7200 RPM.

Mine is definitely CMR. It is slower, 5400 RPM and 200 MB/s, and doesn't have the slowdown that SMR drives demonstrate. Also the model is WD40EZAZ, which all the sites say is CMR.