bleirer

Hi all, are all brands basically alike when it comes to external portable hard drives in the 4-6 terabyte zone? Or do you prefer one brand over another for what reason?

PixelStan77 Loc: Vermont/Chicago

I like Western Digital

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

I'm approaching 20 years of using various sized Western Digital (WD) passports. Never a problem.

jwreed50 Loc: Manassas, VA

I'm certainly not a technical expert here, but I suspect the real choice is whether to go with a solid-state hard drive or a conventional hard drive. Although they may be sold under different brand names, I believe the vast majority of all conventional hard drives are made by either Toshiba or Western Digital, whatever brand name they may be sold under. I don't know if there's really much difference overall in the reliability of Toshiba or WD hard drives.

I prefer to go with a solid state external hard drive -- I think they are more reliable.

bleirer

I think HDD because I think 5 terabytes of SSD will be too expensive. I have SSD on my computer for the boot drive.

cedymock Loc: Irmo, South Carolina

If you are looking at portable external hard drives the Toshiba 4 tb are highly rated, been using Toshiba for years never have had problems or failure.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

SS For "external portable"? For back-up archives? I think when a SS does fail your data is toast. At least with a spinner it can be extracted for a fee. Best to have duplicates or redundancy.

Seagate it a popular brand too but I prefer WD for spinning HDDs.

cedymock Loc: Irmo, South Carolina

Not deniable ssd would be best portable, but at a cost $589.00 for 4tb.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If an SSD is too expensive, I would choose an HDS/WD enterprise class Ultrastar and put it in a fan cooled external enclosure.

GES

I have a 2TB Western Digital Elements (Very small profile) that works great for me. If I need a larger one someday, I would go for the WD again. But as far as I know, this model doesn't run on batteries, so if you need it for downloading in the field ( I don't), you might need something else. Gary

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

I don't prefer spinning drives or extremely high density drives as external portable drives. The high data density makes them too susceptible to transient error, even if not permanent damage. But for spinning drives, I definitely prefer Western Digital. Their drives come in five or six different grades, with differences in speed and reliability. Understand the difference before buying, and realize that pre-packaged external drives generally use the low end drives so that they can sell at the lowest price. Most reliable results can be achieved by buying a higher grade bare drive and mounting it in a separately purchased enclosure.

I just did a little bit of research, and the higher grade drives are only marginally more expensive than the low end ones. Long-term happiness might cost slightly more.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I prefer Western Digital. (apparent reliability)
I have two WD My Passport Ultras and the desktop drive is a WD Gold.
(With another Gold as a clone of the desktop.)
The Gold has an MTBF of up to 2.5 million hours.

joehel2 Loc: Cherry Hill, NJ

Samsung. Seagate reviews cite it as having more failures, sooner, than others.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Well, be aware that portable external spinning disk drives seem to have issues on Macs running Catalina IF you want to use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make bootable backups of the main drive.

I have been using SuperDuper for years without incident on a variety of external spinning disk drives (G-Tech, Buffalo, other brands) without issue - until this past month, after I upgraded to Catalina. Once I did that, SuperDuper required me to reformat the external drive to the APFS format - and after that it continually failed running the backup. I thought perhaps it was the fault of the program, and so bought CCC (having seen many on this forum recommend it). Alas, the same situation happens - CCC fails after a short while.

This has occurred with multiple portable HDDs, including a couple of Toshiba Canvio drives I just purchased last week. In fact, what was happening after I started the backup process (with either backup program) is the iMac would throw the error message about having to dismount the drive before removing it multiple times - as many as 100+ times on my most recent attempt! TO make that clear - I plugged in the drive, used Disk Utility to format it to APFS with GUID partition (as instructed by the programs), started the backup and walked out of my office. Returning some time later i would see the backup failed and then dozens of the error message windows (having to close each one individually allowed me to count them) - in other words, it's as if the drive dismounted and then remounted (and then dismounted) itself all by itself.

Wondering if the drives themselves were the problem, I reformatted (again in APFS) and using Finder copied over the contents of my external RAID drive (about 1.5TB) using just the drag and drop method - and that worked without issue on the very same (older and just purchased) drives that all failed with CCC and SuperDuper.SO, it ain't the hard drives.

Investigating further, I found this page that indicates that the issue is with APFS and its apparent dislike of external rotating disk drives:
https://www.lifewire.com/apfs-on-different-disk-types-4155143

Ergo, I am about to purchase a 1TB SSD external to see if CCC and SuperDuper will work properly with that. So I guess, once again, thanks to Apple for making a perfectly good technology obsolete - idiots.