External hard drives

[amateur12]

List members:


I would greatly appreciate recommendations regarding external hard drives. I’m running Sonoma on an M1 iMac. What are reliable brands of EHD’s that will work with my computer? Thank you in advance for any thoughts.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I don't think the M1 iMac has any particular quirks that would influence the reliability of an external hard drive.

However, which drive might be best could depend on what you're using it for. If you want to share that info you will likely get some good recommendations.

 

[amateur12]

I don't think the M1 iMac has any particular quirks that would influence the reliability of an external hard drive.

However, which drive might be best could depend on what you're using it for. If you want to share that info you will likely get some good recommendations.

Thank you for writing. I want a good EHD for Time Machine backup and for general storage. Thank you for any thoughts.

 

[MisterSavage]

I've got a LaCie Mobile Drive and an older G-Drive. Happy with both of them.

 

[Bigwaff]

For back up purposes, I recommend an external USB drive which has its own power supply rather than a small, bus powered USB drive.

 

[amateur12]

I've got a LaCie Mobile Drive and an older G-Drive. Happy with both of them.

MisterSavage, thanks very much, will check these out.

 

[amateur12]

For back up purposes, I recommend an external USB drive which has its own power supply rather than a small, bus powered USB drive.

Bigwaff, Thanks very much. The power supply sounds important. I wonder why more people don’t mention it. Will definitely buy an EHD with this feature.

 

[MisterSavage]

Bigwaff, Thanks very much. The power supply sounds important. I wonder why more people don’t mention it. Will definitely buy an EHD with this feature.

Because I don't need it for my purposes. I just attach the portable drive to my Mac once in a while (via a cord from the Apple Studio Display) and that powers the drive.

 

[picpicmac]

The power supply sounds important.

For reliability perhaps, especially if you're working with a laptop Mac.

I'm looking for HD for Time Machine also. Right now in my Amazon basket is the (bus powered) WD Elements Portable HD. I picked it because it's one of the newer WD designs and gets better reviews than many others.

I was thinking about one of those Sabrent HD docking stations and a couple of the more expensive HDs to put in it. But I decided to cheap-out as I am currently looking for a solution for the next 12 to 24 months.

If you want to really dive into the issues with HDs from the manufacturers, here's a few recent videos that make my head spin like a cheap platter:

That channel has a lot of other videos on hard drives.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I have a stack of different spinner HDs attached to my Mac Studio and they, as I would suspect, slow things down in macOS when accessing them for system tasks (Open/Save dialogs etc.). One of them is for Time Machine.

Is the OP going to experience any such lag having a single spinner HD used for TM?

If so, should we be recommending an SSD to the OP to avoid this?

That's not even taking into account the extra time required to do a full TM recovery from a spinner versus an SSD.

 

[amateur12]

List members: I thought I'd give some follow-up to my question about EHD's.
I spent some money and got a big external hard drive with its own external power source. It looks like the latter makes a difference. The new EHD reliably shows up on my desktop and works very quickly. Worth the investment, I think.

 

[ChrisA]

Thank you for writing. I want a good EHD for Time Machine backup and for general storage. Thank you for any thoughts.

You can not (or really, should not) use the same drive for backup and storage. So I assume you want TWO external drives.

1) The one for storage shoiuld be a SSD. SOme are faster then others but for most users thay are all "fast enough".

2) for TM you can use a machanocal spinning disk drive or even two of them and tell TM is use both for better realiabilty. Any 4TB drive will be both cheap and fast enough. TM cn use a slow drive as it works in the background and you necver have to wait for it.


the TM drive needs to be at least two ties larger then all the data on your computer, bigger is better. TM will use up all the space you give it and then after then it will delete the oldest data to make room for newer data. That reason for 2X size is so TM can retain more older data.

 

[amateur12]

Chris, Thanks so much for your advice, will act on this.

 

[ThrowerGB]

I've been using Western Digital Elements drives for years. I set them up in dual mode for TM. TM takes care of writing to one and for the next backup, writing to the other. That increases the reliability. I've found the drives to be low cost and reliable and they have their own power supplies. They are simple to set up and they just work. Yes they seem slow, but I don't have to restore very often so I can live with it, even for the very occasional full system restore.
But there's a caveat of reliability. I've recently had a big problem with some sort of disruption on all my local drives. I didn't realize it right away and so it compounded itself, including TM storing damaged files on the damaged structures on the external drives. I strongly suspect some intermittent and brief power interruptions from our electric utility that occurred for a few days. Luckily, I also use software that backs up to a cloud site and I was able to use that to restore.
I use large drives, currently 10 TB. That way they serve as a long term archive as well as just backup. Every year or two, I replace the drives with newer ones and keep the old ones in case I want to go back a long way. But I haven't tested a very old TM backup drive to see if the current OS can use it.
I'm currently running on a Studio Mac M1 Max. I've found that when I/O is happening on the USB ports, Sonoma and Ventura both seem to slow I/O to the internal SSD. This never happened on my 2017 iMac 27" machine.

 

[Ben J.]

You can not (or really, should not) use the same drive for backup and storage. So I assume you want TWO external drives.

To be precise; nothing wrong with using the same drive for TM and storage, as long as TM has its own volume. So format the drive as APSF and create a new volume for TM on it using Disk Utilities.

Legg til, fjern eller slett APFS-volumer i Diskverktøy på Mac

I Diskverktøy på Mac kan du legge til, fjerne eller slette APFS-volumer.

support.apple.com

Hope it shows up in your language, and not norwegian.
I always struggle with this when linking to apple support.

 

[steve123]

I’m running Sonoma on an M1 iMac

You have an AS M1 which comes with a TB port capable of 40 Gbps data transfer rate. A spinning magnetic disk will not keep up. Consider one of the TB3/4 or USB4 NVMe SSD enclosures. There are a lot of choices now that ASMedia sells TB controllers (previously only Intel made TB controllers) and the data transfer rates using a PCIe gen 3 or better NVMe SSD are typically close to 3000 MB/s or more. You can transfer in seconds what would take hours using a magnetic disk.

 

[Ben J.]

You have an AS M1 which comes with a TB port capable of 40 Gbps data transfer rate. A spinning magnetic disk will not keep up. Consider one of the TB3/4 or USB4 NVMe SSD enclosures. There are a lot of choices now that ASMedia sells TB controllers (previously only Intel made TB controllers) and the data transfer rates using a PCIe gen 3 or better NVMe SSD are typically close to 3000 MB/s or more. You can transfer in seconds what would take hours using a magnetic disk.

Fantastic tranfer speeds can be had these days for sure, but the cost is such that it would make sense with workspace storage for big audio- video- files etc, not so much for backup and general storage that the OP mentions.

 

[ThrowerGB]

To be precise; nothing wrong with using the same drive for TM and storage, as long as TM has its own volume. So format the drive as APSF and create a new volume for TM on it using Disk Utilities.

I disagree. If there's a disk failure, you most likely lose both your data and your backup. The single disk might be damaged in a fire, a flood, a tornado, a lightening strike, etc. Your kids might do something to it. Someone might spill beer on it. It might be stolen. You might have an electricity surge. Of course it's not a 100% certainty, but consider yourself lucky if the single disk survives with its data and I/O intact. It's better practice to physically separate your data from its backup. It's also good practice to have several backups in different locations such as on-site, off-site, and in the cloud.

 

[Ben J.]

I disagree. If there's a disk failure, you most likely lose both your data and your backup. The single disk might be damaged in a fire, a flood, a tornado, a lightening strike, etc. Your kids might do something to it. Someone might spill beer on it. It might be stolen. You might have an electricity surge. Of course it's not a 100% certainty, but consider yourself lucky if the single disk survives with its data and I/O intact. It's better practice to physically separate your data from its backup. It's also good practice to have several backups in different locations such as on-site, off-site, and in the cloud.

Sure. I didn't say you'd have to have critical data on the non-TM volume, and it's of course just silly to back up to a volume on the same physical drive, I just pointed out that TM doesn't necessarily have to occupy the whole drive. Personally I have an extra volume on one of my backup drives that I use for non-critical data, data transfer and such, and it's never backed up.

 

[ThrowerGB]

Sure. I didn't say you'd have to have critical data on the non-TM volume, and it's of course just silly to back up to a volume on the same physical drive, I just pointed out that TM doesn't necessarily have to occupy the whole drive. Personally I have an extra volume on one of my backup drives that I use for non-critical data, data transfer and such, and it's never backed up.

Good point.

 

[jayducharme]

I'm doing a lot of 4k video editing. I have an 18 tb G Drive where the media is kept. I've been experience a LOT of spinning beach balls in Final Cut Pro X every time I drag a clip to the timeline. I have a Mac Studio with an M2 Max chip, so I can't imagine that's the problem. And I have a TB 3 cable connected directly to the drive. The claimed throughput on the drive is 260mbps. I suspect that's just too slow for the work I'm doing. What I'm wondering is what external drive should I get for the type of work I'm doing. I've been looking at two in particular:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HNRL2LL/A/promise-pegasus32-r4-16tb-raid-system
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3TBL8X16/

The Pegasus is supposedly fast and reliable but noisy. Noise is a big concern for me because I do a lot of vocal recording. The Thunderblade is completely silent, extremely expensive and has iffy reviews for its RAID performance. Any suggestions?

 

[PaulD-UK]

For video editing TB SSDs are the way to go for 4K media files being worked on.

RAID 5 with HDs is fine for long term storage but a RAID 0 array is needed to work off with HDs.

RAID isn’t needed for editing off SSDs, but can help with managing large storage units.

 

[Ben J.]

I'm doing a lot of 4k video editing. I have an 18 tb G Drive where the media is kept. I've been experience a LOT of spinning beach balls in Final Cut Pro X every time I drag a clip to the timeline. I have a Mac Studio with an M2 Max chip, so I can't imagine that's the problem. And I have a TB 3 cable connected directly to the drive. The claimed throughput on the drive is 260mbps. I suspect that's just too slow for the work I'm doing. What I'm wondering is what external drive should I get for the type of work I'm doing. I've been looking at two in particular:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HNRL2LL/A/promise-pegasus32-r4-16tb-raid-system
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3TBL8X16/

The Pegasus is supposedly fast and reliable but noisy. Noise is a big concern for me because I do a lot of vocal recording. The Thunderblade is completely silent, extremely expensive and has iffy reviews for its RAID performance. Any suggestions?

A quick fix while you're deciding what to do, is to copy the project folder you're currently working on to your internal drive, which should be more than fast enough.

 

[steve123]

What I'm wondering is what external drive should I get for the type of work I'm doing

As mentioned earlier you should consider a configuration using a TB connected SSD. You have a Mac Studio with M2 Max so you can use two TB 3/4 SSD NVMe enclosures connected to separate TB ports(see note) on the Mac Studio and configure them as RAID0 array. This configuration will achieve close to 6000 MB/s which is close to the speed of the internal SSD. There are several TB 3/4 NVMe enclosures available. Some of the newer ones use the ASMedia 2464PD controller which has a slightly better performance than the enclosures using the Intel Titan Ridge and Goshen Ridge controllers. Since you are doing video work you might consider an enclosures with an internal fan to keep the SSD cool. You will need a PCI gen 3 NVMe SSD. Stay away from Samsung NVMe SSD's as there are known issues with TRIM On Macs. Some enclosures support an 8TB NVMe SSD so two in RAID0 will provide 16 TB of storage. Use the 18 TB spinning disk as a back up for the SSD.

Have a look at the Sonnet Echo Dual NVMe enclosure:

Echo Dual NVMe Thunderbolt Dock - SONNETTECH

Thunderbolt docking station with two M.2 NVMe SSD slots, four USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ports, and up to 5K display support. For Mac, Windows, and iPad Pro.

www.sonnettech.com

Two of these on separate TB ports would provide support for up to 32 TB of storage In RAID0. The most cost effective solution would be two Echo docks and 4 x 4TB NVMe SSD's = 16 TB storage. This solution would be half the price of the OWC product you linked to and twice the speed. The 8TB NVMe SSD's are more than 2x the 4TB price.

Note: The "front panel port" has two USB 3.1 Gen 2 USB C ports. You need to connect each SSD of the RAID0 array to a separate TB port. Avoid connecting multiple SSD's to the same port using a dock or hub or connecting the SSD's to USB ports.

Clarification: the Mac Studio M2 Max has 4 TB ports on the rear panel. Each of these ports has its own controller and each port can tunnel 4 lanes of PCI gen 3 data (32 gbps) through the TB port to a TB connected SSD. The front panel has two USB C connectors that look similar to a TB port but they are USB 3.1 gen 2 10 gbps ports.

 

[jayducharme]

A quick fix while you're deciding what to do, is to copy the project folder you're currently working on to your internal drive, which should be more than fast enough.

Yeah, I've had to do that with several of the bigger projects. It's a pain but it works.