Best external drive to use to clone MacBook Pro

About a month ago my 2011 Macbook Pro hard disk crashed. Luckily, I was able to restore everything from backup stored on my Time Capsule using Time Machine. Moving forward, in addition to using Time Machine, I would like to clone my Macbook Pro to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Could someone please advise exactly what kind of external drive I should get? My Macbook Pro's internal drive is a Seagate 500GB SATA laptop drive. I'm running Mavericks OS X 10.9.4. Thank you in advance for your help!

You really don't need Seagate's software to use the external drive with your Mac.
Open Disk Utility in your Applications > Utility Folder and depending on what you want to use the Seagate for..... simply re-format it.
For example:
If you want to use it for Time Machine, erase it and format it Mac OS Extended.
If you want to use it to share photo's, music and doc files between PC's and your Mac, erase it and format it MS-DOS FAT-32.
If you want to make a bootable clone using Disk Utility, CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, erase it, set the Partition Scheme to GUID Partition and the format to Mac OS Extended.
Cautioning that, formatting will erase all the data on the drive.
So if you have been using it with a PC and it is formatted NTFS, then your Mac can only read the data on the drive..

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You should check your date of purchase against the manufacturer's warranty
or guaranty since some of those better brands have some recourse should
they fail within a specified time period. A good reason to save dated receipts.
Since solid-state USB drives probably don't (all) use a wear-leveling software
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x

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Use Apple's Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder to format the drive.
The programs on the drive given to you by the manufacturer is likely backup software (or malware) and essentially worthless, it will be wiped when you format the drive.
I do NOT advise you partition that drive for TimeMachine, rather I advise you not to use TimeMachine at all for your purposes because TM is just a backup, not a bootable drive.
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Next use Disk Utility to Repair Permisisons on both drive. Now reboot the machine and hold the option key down, you can select the external drive clone to boot from!!
You can update the clone the same way by using CCC, but it doesn't take as long, only copying changes.
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The objective with the clone drive is you keep it safe, and not carting it around where it can be more subjective to damage like the other drive will be.
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I back up every day, I also have 2 back up drives, which you should also have, if your data is imporant to you.
A Time Machine back up, and a clone (which is bootable)
I use a OWC Elite,and a IOmega.
Use Time Machine on OWC:
ttp://eshop.macsales.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=adwords& gclid=COCM8O3uuLsCFSUOOgodVBEAOwuuLsCFSUOOgodVBEAOw
IOMEGA:
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These are but a few that are available for affordable prices, I have had very good performance from both, there is going to be many other opinions, and all are valid, I just sat stay away from WD as they have been problematic.
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http://www.bombich.com/
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