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AppleHater

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 9, 2010
788
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As I'm going to order rMBPro now, I wonder what external hdd others to use to store photos and music. Which connection type do you use? USB3?
 
i have a seagate freeagent goflex, was cheap and gets the job done. i wish i could afford the airport wireless but i just got a new router i can plug this into and do the same thing.
 
I'm very happy with my 2TB WD MyPassport portable drive. This was the highest capacity portable, bus-powered drive I could find. It's as small as a deck of cards and very easy to bring it with me when I'm mobile. I just plug in the USB3 cable and I'm good to go. It's not super fast, but at close to 100 MB/s it's plenty fast enough for my needs. I store all my videos, music and photo's on it.

I also keep a mirror image on an older 3.5" 2TB drive for backup of my media. I also use another external drive for Time Machine and clone backups of my internal SSD.
 
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I have several models of external disks for backup/mirrors; Western Digital and Seagate and combinations of firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0/3.0. I use SuperDuper and make bootable clones, never use Time Machine.
 
Using a 2TB HP USB 3 external for Time Machine and photo back ups. Got it for free, I wouldn't have chosen any HP product if I had to pay money or it.
I've been looking at the ADATA Dash Drive Durable HD710 for a travel drive. I like that it's so well protected from drop and shock damage, it's slim and functional, the single USB 3 cord clips onto it for easy storage. Just seems like a solid drive.
 
Some random thoughts from a data recovery perspective (since your new drive will die eventually):

- 2.5" Western Digital My Passport drives are encrypted and have a USB port built directly into the PCB. Both make data recovery more expensive and harder, which means if this drive dies, you're less likely to get your files recovered.

- The larger the drive, the more likely it is to fail. Don't buy a 4TB drive if you only need 100GB of space (buy a 500GB instead). I also don't recommend buying "Slim" or "Fat" 2.5" portable drives.

- I recommend buying two cheap drives and always keeping a backup. Something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expan...&keywords=500+gb+external+hard+drive+portable

- If you want the fastest drive, get one with Thunderbolt, like this: http://www.amazon.com/BUFFALO-MiniS...36&sr=8-1&keywords=portable+thunderbolt+drive
 
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G Technology drives, two standard size and three mini's. The top drive is dedicated to Time Machine and the others are paired for redundancy of paperwork and images. They are high quality and I've had zero problems in the eight years since I've started using the brand.
 

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G Technology drives, two standard size and three mini's. The top drive is dedicated to Time Machine and the others are paired for redundancy of paperwork and images. They are high quality and I've had zero problems in the eight years since I've started using the brand.
I've had a G-Tech G-Drive for 3 years and it has also worked flawlessly, so I went and bought a G-Raid to use as my primary data storage (backed up religiously of course). Unfortunately it arrived DOA and I had to send it back. I have read many such stories about G-Tech recently, indicating that maybe they have gone downhill. How recently did you buy your latest drive?
 
Sorry to hear about the issue, I assume that they replaced it immediately. I bought my last drive three months ago along with a used enclosure and moved the MBP HDD into it after buying an SSD.
 
For photos, videos, and music you don't need a lot of speed so I picked 4TB USB3 drives, two Seagate backup pluses and two HGST Touro Desks. About $600 for 16TB, but you probably don't need that much capacity. CCC backs up one pair to the other.

If you have a need for speed then a RAID or thunderbolt solution would make some sense but at a high entry price.
 
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