Best USB-C option for large external storage

[Bodhitree]

I have inherited a bit of a mess of illustrations on a variety of old Mac disks. Some CD’s, some external hard drives, and a couple of no-longer functional old Macs which still have valuable data on their drives.

For most of this I do not have the appropriate interface cables, I don’t think I have a working CD drive in the house, so I was thinking of farming this job out to a local third-party Mac shop, to collect all the data and put it onto a single working external drive with a USB-C interface so that people can use a modern Mac to organise it and view it.

The total storage is an estimated 10 TB. Does anyone have any recommendations for what kind of disk to ask for?

 

[ignatius345]

Any external hard drive can connect via USB-C as long as you use the right cable. I wouldn't get hung up on that part.

10TB is a lot, so you'll end up with a powered desktop drive instead of a portable one. I've had fine luck with Western Digital and Toshiba but honestly I think any of the big brands is probably fine. Something like this might fit the bill.

Here's the most important part (and I think any professional will tell you this too): if this data is important, you have to back everything up onto a second drive.

I know, it's more expense, more space, more annoyance. But you absolutely have to treat hard drives as if they may fail at any moment. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do, and spending an extra $200 on a second drive is good and cheap insurance compared the cost of data recovery or just flat-out data loss.

 

[Bodhitree]

So basically any big brand disk is ok? Are there any with longer warranties?

 

[mmkerc]

IN this area I like the Samsung t5 or T7 SSD hard drives. They have a very small footprint, though there are limited to 2 TB each. If you data can be segmented into categories that size is may be an option. But for a 10 tB solution I like the LaCie 2Big solution. I have the 8 tB raid with an M1 Mac mini. I believe cost is still under $1k.

 

[RedTomato]

How valuable is this data? How valuable is the time of you and your team? As you're asking here, I guess you'd rather not spend too much.

10 TB of data, i have a suspicion that most of that data is in a few larger video files. If you can quickly find and review the largest files you might be able to cut that down to maybe 7TB.

If you're doing this on the cheap, maybe for 1x (8TB or 10TB) 3.5" HDD as a back up, plus 2x (4TB or 5TB) 2.5" portable HDDs for doing the sorting and categorisation. It seems this work is being shared between different people, and having a mini-HDD that you can just plug into USB and go, no mains power needed, is so much more handy and practical.

* If you're doing this really cheap, then feel free to run the risk of not having a backup 3.5" HDD. When you finish the sorting, if you end up with less than 4TB of data, you can use the two 2.5" HDDs as copies of each other.

* Remember HDDs don't like being more than around 80-90% full and will slow down drastically, so if you have a full 10TB of data then you need around 12TB of HDD space to store it.

* You can buy a HDD dock for around $35 to ease the work of getting data off old drives. https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=hdd+docking+station

* HDD docks also work with 2.5" SATA SSDs, but not with m.2 NVMe drives from mac laptops from 2013 onwards.

* USB CD/DVD drives are also around $20 each.

* If you don't have a USB-3 to USB-C dongle / mini-hub, now is a good time to get one. Cheaper than asking a mac shop to do it, you're likely to pay around $50-100 per hour of their time.