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Which External Harddrive?

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zachbradley

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 18, 2014
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America
I am looking for a desktop external harddrive for my Mac mini. I was wondering if it would be beneficial to get an AC powered harddrive. (It will remain stationary on my desk so I wont mind needing a power supply for it). If so, which one?. I plan on using it primarily as a backup, so one capable of the Time Machine feature is preferred.

Also, which brands should I stay away from?

Thanks!
 
zachbradley said:
I am looking for a desktop external harddrive for my Mac mini. I was wondering if it would be beneficial to get an AC powered harddrive. (It will remain stationary on my desk so I wont mind needing a power supply for it). If so, which one?. I plan on using it primarily as a backup, so one capable of the Time Machine feature is preferred.

Also, which brands should I stay away from?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

If you don't mind having an AC powered EHD on your desk, go for it. Currently, Western Digital, LaCie, and several other brands have desktop AC powered hard drives. The one brand I would personally stay away from is anything made by Seagate. Check with Amazon.com for good prices or Mac Sales. www.macsales.com
 
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If it's going to stay on your desktop, don't get something ugly. Check the Apple store for some good options at good prices.

Any disk can do Time Machine, but remember you can only have one disk to back up everything. I got the 8TB version of the Lacie Porsche Design USB 3 drive. The Apple store only goes to 5 or 6 TB.

Ignore claims of 5Gb/s speed - that is only the theoretical max for a higher class of device, sometimes called Fast. The Apple store drives are common <200MB/s drives, hence the prices are so good. A Thunderbolt drive won't be any faster than that.
 
zachbradley said:
Also, which brands should I stay away from?
Click to expand...

Seagate and LaCie (which is owned by Seagate)

I agree that you can get pretty much what you need from Amazon, MacSales.com or NewEgg.

The drives at macsales.com are more expensive, but the cases are really nice and can be reused with a new hard drive mechanism in the years after the original has died.

All you really need to do is work out how big your drive needs to be... will 2TB suffice or do you need something much bigger. I recommend dedicating a hard drive to time machine use alone, rather than using the same time machine drive to keep other files, because then you really won't have a true backup of any files you put onto the non-time machine partition of the hard drive. The size of the time machine drive should be 1.5 to 2x the total amount of data you want to backup.
 
G-Technology - G-DRIVE with Thunderbolt 3TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Silver
 
Ditto on the Lacie Porsche Design USB 3 drive. I have the 2TB for a couple years now. Nice Looking, no extra power cables, been very reliable and easy to partition.
 
HGST "bare drive".
Then put it into a good enclosure of your own choosing.
 
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