Will this external drive work with my MacBook Air M1?

[John1986]

Hello

I bought myself a new external harddrive yesterday, and its this one LaCie Mobile Drive 1TB , I haven't received it yet. customer service where I bought it said its usb c, but is there different USB C cables, or is there only one standard? I have a MacBook Air 2020 M1 with two usb c outputs.

what I'm asking, is if this works on my Mac?

 

[John1986]

I found its product code, its
LaCie Mobile Drive 1 TB
STHG1000400

 

[jerryk]

It should work. They list Mac compatibility and it has a USB-C port.

Also, on USB-C there are different cables, by they only vary in how much max power they carry. Any cable should support powering this drive and transferring data.

Note that it looks like this is a rotational drive, not an SSD. So it is going to be considerably slower than its SSD counterpart.

 

[xraydoc]

Hello

I bought myself a new external harddrive yesterday, and its this one LaCie Mobile Drive 1TB , I haven't received it yet. customer service where I bought it said its usb c, but is there different USB C cables, or is there only one standard? I have a MacBook Air 2020 M1 with two usb c outputs.

what I'm asking, is if this works on my Mac?

Yes. It’ll work.

 

[John1986]

It should work. They list Mac compatibility and it has a USB-C port.

Also, on USB-C there are different cables, by they only vary in how much max power they carry. Any cable should support powering this drive and transferring data.

Note that it looks like this is a rotational drive, not an SSD. So it is going to be considerably slower than its SSD counterpart.

Great that it'll work how long do you think it will take to backup using time machine? the disk on my Mac is 256gb, I don't have any huge files on it, no videos or anything

Edit:i have the MacBook Air M1 with 8GB and 256GB

 

[xraydoc]

Great that it'll work how long do you think it will take to backup using time machine? the disk on my Mac is 256gb, I don't have any huge files on it, no videos or anything

Edit:i have the MacBook Air M1 with 8GB and 256GB

There's no way to know without knowing how much space you've got used on your Mac, but given that it's a conventional HDD and not an SSD, I'd probably guess the initial backup will take an hour or so. Subsequent backups only copy over the files that have changed, so those will go by very quickly.

 

[Quackers]

I have the same drive and the same Mac and it works just fine.
Backups on mine take just a few minutes but I don't have much on it - maybe 80GB total.

 

[John1986]

There's no way to know without knowing how much space you've got used on your Mac, but given that it's a conventional HDD and not an SSD, I'd probably guess the initial backup will take an hour or so. Subsequent backups only copy over the files that have changed, so those will go by very quickly.

Thanks for the reply hopefully it won't take longer than that, I have used 42gb of space on my hard drive

 

[John1986]

I have the same drive and the same Mac and it works just fine.
Backups on mine take just a few minutes but I don't have much on it - maybe 80GB total.

Great, thank you, I will receive the hard drive today, so I'm looking forward to that does the cable have one side usb c and another usb type on the other end of the cable? I am wondering cause, in the picture it looks like its a bigger output than usb c on the hard drive

this is the picture I'm talking about

 

[Quackers]

Great, thank you, I will receive the hard drive today, so I'm looking forward to that does the cable have one side usb c and another usb type on the other end of the cable? I am wondering cause, in the picture it looks like its a bigger output than usb c on the hard drive

this is the picture I'm talking about View attachment 1899304

No, pretty sure it's USB-C to USB-C.

 

[John1986]

No, pretty sure it's USB-C to USB-C.

Great, thanks

 

[xraydoc]

Great, thanks

Use the USB-C cable that comes with the drive and not the USB-C charging cable that came with your Mac. The charge cable doesn't support full-speed data transfer. While it may not make a huge difference with a mechanical HD, it most certainly would if you were using an SSD.

 

[Quackers]

Use the USB-C cable that comes with the drive and not the USB-C charging cable that came with your Mac. The charge cable doesn't support full-speed data transfer. While it may not make a huge difference with a mechanical HD, it most certainly would if you were using an SSD.

Interesting about the charge cable, but definitely believable.
I mention it because Apple says the charge cable is sufficient for use with Apple Configurator 2 when restoriong a mac which, as I understand it, needs a constant uninterrupted connection and there's a fair amount of transfer going on there.

 

[John1986]

Use the USB-C cable that comes with the drive and not the USB-C charging cable that came with your Mac. The charge cable doesn't support full-speed data transfer. While it may not make a huge difference with a mechanical HD, it most certainly would if you were using an SSD.

I will

 

[xraydoc]

Interesting about the charge cable, but definitely believable.
I mention it because Apple says the charge cable is sufficient for use with Apple Configurator 2 when restoriong a mac which, as I understand it, needs a constant uninterrupted connection and there's a fair amount of transfer going on there.

It'll work, but I believe it supports USB 2.0 speeds, not full 3.1 speeds.

 

[John1986]

I have just done my first Time Machine backup it took about 5 minutes to complete. the cable that was in the box was USB C to USB C just like Quackers said.