Was looking at getting a good portable external drive

[TheGeneralLee86]

I am looking for a good portable HDD drive that is 4TB and I will use it for Time Machine Back ups from my iMac and also my windows computer backups. I also wanna use it for playing Movies, TV shows, Music and also for using as Virtual Drive for my virtual machines through Parallels too.

This is the drive I am looking at now: here

 

[mojito]

I have a 3TB Seagate currently that I store media files on and it's worked wonders so far. Reliable, fast, sturdy. Don't use it for TimeMachine backups or anything like that but it's worked well for me so far. Also, don't know if you're planning to get that on Amazon, but make sure you check elsewhere and compare prices!

 

[TheGeneralLee86]

I have a 3TB Seagate currently that I store media files on and it's worked wonders so far. Reliable, fast, sturdy. Don't use it for TimeMachine backups or anything like that but it's worked well for me so far. Also, don't know if you're planning to get that on Amazon, but make sure you check elsewhere and compare prices!

Yeah I definitely will be checking all possible places I can think of for prices on it.

 

[MCAsan]

I looks like all the eggs in one basket. If you lose that drive, you lose your only backups and all your media library?

Consider two drives with one for libraries and a second one for Time Machine.

 

[ColdCase]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I don't like putting TM backups on the same drive as data. TM has a tendency to eventually use up all the space. A drive dedicated for TM backups is better long term, about twice the size of the sum of the HDs in the machines backing up. Smaller 2TB drives can be bought for $70. Then use another, perhaps more portable drive for media and working files and then another for a backup of the "portable" media drive. Both Hitachi and Seagate have 4TB drive in the $130 range. I have a few and prefer the Hitachi, but these are relatively slow drives and have big power supply boxes.

Then, do you really need 4TB for media and working files? You can fit years of SD video on that. The money you save by going to a smaller would offset the cost of more drives. But then there's clutter

 

[mojito]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I don't like putting TM backups on the same drive as data. TM has a tendency to eventually use up all the space. A drive dedicated for TM backups is better long term, about twice the size of the sum of the HDs in the machines backing up. Smaller 2TB drives can be bought for $70. Then use another, perhaps more portable drive for media and working files and then another for a backup of the "portable" media drive. Both Hitachi and Seagate have 4TB drive in the $130 range. I have a few and prefer the Hitachi, but these are relatively slow drives and have big power supply boxes.

Then, do you really need 4TB for media and working files? You can fit years of SD video on that. The money you save by going to a smaller would offset the cost of more drives. But then there's clutter

This might make me a dunce, but I've never done any TM backups EVER. I'm starting to get a bit more wary of my MBP and looking to get an external solely for TM backups now that it's getting old. My question is: what size should be good for a drive dedicated solely for TM backups? No idea how big these backup files are or how many to keep at one time, so I could use a little advice. Thx.

 

[MCAsan]

I would want a minimum of two times the size of the entire system it is to backup, not just the info on the boot drive. That is so it can keep a long history from which you can retrieve/restore files. That is twice the size of all the files....not twice the size of all the drive space the Mac has.

I use a 6TB drive to backup my file system of around 3TB of OS, apps, and data. My library drives are 6TB, but they are only around half full right now.