Portable HDs are like banks. Most people have had a beef with at least one of them. In the end, we still deal with banks...
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Western Digital Announces Redesigned My Passport Portable Hard Drives
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Finally! Pocket-sized 4TB drives! Moore's law sure got lazy nowadays. WD is one of the hard drive brands that I've always been very happy with. They're ugly as hell though. I liked the black box design. But looks aren't of big importance for a hard drive, to me.
One day I bought a Samsung USB external drive and it would power off completely when I put my Mac to sleep with the disk plugged in, causing a "hardware not ejected properly" message every single time I opened my Mac. They don't tell you about that when you buy it, but with WD you can trust that you won't have weird issues like that. There's more to it than storage, price, and speed. The power saving features of some brands can make a disk completely unusable.
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That awkward moment when even your external HDD comes with twice as much warranty as your Mac...
One day I bought a Samsung USB external drive and it would power off completely when I put my Mac to sleep with the disk plugged in, causing a "hardware not ejected properly" message every single time I opened my Mac. They don't tell you about that when you buy it, but with WD you can trust that you won't have weird issues like that. There's more to it than storage, price, and speed. The power saving features of some brands can make a disk completely unusable.
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That awkward moment when even your external HDD comes with twice as much warranty as your Mac...
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I like how selling colored versions makes them "more personal".
These drives are junk. I've owned many and you're luck to get 2 years out of them.
Cloud. Cloud is the answer. Just ask my buddy whose Porsche drive gave up after 2 years and took irreplaceable photos and videos with it. Sure, he could send the platters in for data recovery but that costs an exponential amount more than the drive itself.
These drives are junk. I've owned many and you're luck to get 2 years out of them.
Cloud. Cloud is the answer. Just ask my buddy whose Porsche drive gave up after 2 years and took irreplaceable photos and videos with it. Sure, he could send the platters in for data recovery but that costs an exponential amount more than the drive itself.
The first thing to do when buying one of these drives is to reformat it and completely wipe away any traces of backup or encryption software created by WD.
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Try doing a full restore or booting from a cloud backup.
No one's mentioned how these blatantly rip off the design of the Xbox One?
Or something called redundant backups. Having only one backup of one's most critical data is foolish. A second backup off-site is even preferable - your home at work if secure and work at home if allowable.
I've never had a single copy of my Photos or iTunes Library, and I sure as hell don't want hundreds of GBs of my personal data on a server in Nevada. Should my Mac croak, I want to be back to working in a reasonable amount of time.
Or something called redundant backups. Having only one backup of one's most critical data is foolish. A second backup off-site is even preferable - your home at work if secure and work at home if allowable.
I've never had a single copy of my Photos or iTunes Library, and I sure as hell don't want hundreds of GBs of my personal data on a server in Nevada. Should my Mac croak, I want to be back to working in a reasonable amount of time.
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That's why we have backups.
Even with USB 3 you will be severely limited by the drive read and write speed. If you are in the market for one of these drives (i. e. non-ssd), these will be as good as any and you might as well buy them right now.
I don't work in IT anymore but I've had really good success with Hitatchi drives.
No one's mentioned how these blatantly rip off the design of the Xbox One?
Or something called redundant backups. Having only one backup of one's most critical data is foolish. A second backup off-site is even preferable - your home at work if secure and work at home if allowable.
I've never had a single copy of my Photos or iTunes Library, and I sure as hell don't want hundreds of GBs of my personal data on a server in Nevada. Should my Mac croak, I want to be back to working in a reasonable amount of time.
A billion dollar server farm gets my vote.
Because it or your ISP boast 100% uptime? Without sync errors?
We're getting there, but we're not there yet.
I recently upgraded my computer's hard drive from a HDD to a SSD, and my passport drive is lightning fast with file transfers over USB 3
Could someone figure out for me, because I can't seem to, if I can just connect the new drive on USB 3 and click partition, make it a logical volume or journaled, whatever I do right now, and then it works? Point time machine and other stuff to it and I am done? Or do i *have* to leave their custom partition on there, use their drivers and software, backup, and encryption, etc?
Because right now I just plug a LaCie drive in, tell it to be 1 partition, and time machine uses it, as well as being used to store some media and project files. Works fine on any mac i plug it into.
I really don't want to install WD software, or use their scheduled backup, or being unable to right click > encrypt > because they use their own encryption nonsense.
My experience with external drives is buy cheap OEM, plug it on a chip, and into my usb port, use it, when full, switch to the next one.
Because right now I just plug a LaCie drive in, tell it to be 1 partition, and time machine uses it, as well as being used to store some media and project files. Works fine on any mac i plug it into.
I really don't want to install WD software, or use their scheduled backup, or being unable to right click > encrypt > because they use their own encryption nonsense.
My experience with external drives is buy cheap OEM, plug it on a chip, and into my usb port, use it, when full, switch to the next one.
The main reason I'm interested in TB3 in a MBP is for use with a hub. I'd like to come to my desk and plug in one cable and get power, audio, my TB daisy chain (which is connected to several larger RAID units), iPhone dock, several additional USB plugs (for drives like this), and an external display.
I wonder if I can yank these drives out and put them in my NAS? I have redundancy against drive failures but these drives are $100 cheaper than buying the 8TB as an internal only drive separately.
You must be too young to remember the Deskstars. In any case, the WD and HGST lines are already being merged, it was delayed several years due to antitrust reasons.
USB 3 is roughly the same speed as SATA 3, and both are far faster than any mechanical storage. If you're talking SSDs, then yes, USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt could help there, but with mechanical drives, there's no reason for the added expense and greatly reduced compatibility. Very few non-Apple computers have Thunderbolt, and a lot of people need that cross compatibility.