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Which external drive might be good?

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I'd say for backups get a spinning drive, for anythign else get a SSD. I'm happy with my Samsung T3 (its up to a T5 now).

As for the reviews, given that the number of 1 stars is only 13% of the reviews, take them into context and comparison of what's been written with 5 and 4 stars.

Amazon, you do have a return period, so I recommend trying it as best you can and if works well, great, if not return it.
 
External disk drives are basically a commodity. There are only a few manufacturers left (3? 4?) and they all make more or less the same quality product, i.e. pretty good. Any individual drive might die young; I've had 3 drive failures in my personal systems over the years and they were 3 different manufacturers.
 
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OP:

The BEST external drive will be one that you put together yourself.

Get a "bare" hard drive of your own choosing.
I suggest either Toshiba or HGST (Hitachi) instead of WD or Seagate.

Then, get an enclosure like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/MiniPro-USB-...ords=oyen+digital+minipro+3.1+usb-c+enclosure
Best enclosure I've used.

It goes together with a few screws, that's it.

Initialize it with Disk Utility (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled), and then it's ready to use.
 
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Fishrrman,

How is one you put together yourself better than others that are put together by the company?
Would buying a already put-together Toshiba be just as good?
 
It's a question of cost, plus if you get the USB enclosure yourself you can make sure you're getting UASP support which is important for performance. A properly spec'ed, already put together unit is no better or worse than what you can do yourself, but you generally pay more for the prebuilt unit.
 
3.5 inch enclosures might be a bit more expensive than 2.5 inch simply because they are less in demand, but other than that, either drive would be fine -- although you still haven't said what the intended use is Boot drive? secondary storage? backup? ???
 
are you going to boot Windows from that drive or just use it as an additional storage drive? I am not sure that all versions of Windows can boot from a GPT partitioned drive. In any case, I don't do Windows, so best I let someone else answer.
 
OP wrote:
"I think I want to get this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canv...qid=1524759144&sr=8-4&keywords=toshiba++drive"

That looks like a decent drive. I just see too many posts from folks with WD and Seagate drives having problems with them.

However -- I would NOT use this as a "cross-platform" drive (formatted for both the Mac and PCs).

Keep your "Mac stuff" on a MAC-formatted drive (HFS+).
Things will just go better that way.

If you want a drive with which to transfer stuff back-and-forth between the Mac and a PC, use a dedicated drive for just that purpose. A USB flash drive will do this well.
 
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Could you still read the drive from a PC?
I was thinking of burning materials on this using Mac and then only reading on PC if I later get one.
[doublepost=1525280811][/doublepost]I guess a combination would work too, like using one for Mac only and then a USB like you said.
 
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