What's the "best" external/portable hard drive for a Mac Notebook?

I've gone through 2 completely different kinds of WD external hard drives with my Mac Notebook (late-2011, OS X Yosemite 10.10.2), and both literally burned out after only about 18 months.  The disk itself completely died and even when I took it to a computer repair store and they cracked the case open to extract the disk itself to hook up to another drive, it was still dead or wouldn't work.  I had to have it shipped out to a 3rd party data recovery service both times to have some/most of the data salvaged and recovered (and each times it cost me between $700-$1,000!).
I use my external drive as my main data source and store all of my files there due to it's portability advantages, so I probably do run these external drives pretty hard, especially when running iTunes.
Unless told otherwise, I'm getting away from the WD products for obvious reasons.
So which brand of portable external drives are the most reliable and/or "best" for Mac Notebook users?  I'm looking for something that's at least 1 TB and connects via Firewire 800.
Thanks in advance.
- Rob

Given the low cost of an external HD compared with the expense of data recovery services it might be an idea to buy two HD's and duplicate the data across both drives, then if one fails you still have all your data on the other which can be quickly and easily copied across to a new drive to replace the failed one - so you always have two copies of your data.

Similar Messages

  • What is the best 3rd party optical drive for my mac?

    What is the best 3rd party optical drive for my mac?

    I really like this drive, it reads/writes DVD's and CD's just fine on my mac and on my PC aswell also it has only 1 USB so it will only take up one of your 4 USB's
    Amazon UK link
    Amazon US link

  • What is the best audio production hard drive for macbook pro 13" 2.53 ghz?

    I'm new to mac, this has been a big transition.
    I've been looking on newegg and there are tons of choices.
    Looking for a good hard drive for music production in live 8, 7200 rpm has been recommended. Should it be internal or external?
    I'm making minimalist oldschool synthpop so I don't need too many plugins or tracks at once but I am gigging so I want gear that's simple, I love everything about the apogee duet in this respect.
    I have macbook pro 13" 2.53 ghz 4GB ram
    Apogee Duet
    Ableton live 8 standard

    For internal, you can't go wrong with the Hitachi Travelstar. They work very well with the MacBook Pro and right now you can get 300 GB of 7200 RPM for less than 75 dollars at Newegg. You could try that and see if you really need an external given the type of music you're working with.
    If you decide to get an external, I would steer away from all-purpose drives and get one designed for audio, like the Glyph drives. Along the Apogee Duet simplicity lines, they're designed for music production and they just work. Most of them come with carrying cases. Just plug the Glyph into your MacBook Pro, plug the Duet into the Glyph, and that's it.

  • What is the best portable hard drive for my mac

    What is the best portable hard drive for my mac?

    A lot depends on the size you want...physical size, I mean...see what they have at OWC, http://www.macsales.com I have thee of there drives and they are great...compatible and already formatted out-of-the-box.  But it is still better to format and partition yourself to set them up your way.

  • What is the best choice of hard drives?

    My G4 AGP.350MHz with 1.3 GHz upgrade needs an additional internal hard drive for backup. It currently has an 80 GB and 160 GB. I am moving out the 80 GB HDD to my G3 Beige. I am thinking about getting a 80-120 GB for replacement. What is the best choice of hard drives?
    Will the 80 GB hard drive, with Mac OS 10.4.4 installed, run in my G3 Beige 233MHz with G4 500MHz upgrade?
    Thanks.
    Robert

    "What is the best choice of hard drives?"
    I'm thinking of adding a drive to my G4. I will probably put a 150 MB SATA PCI card in and get a SATA drive. Going from the ATA66 interface to the 150 SATA should be a noticeable improvement.
    "Will the 80 GB hard drive, with Mac OS 10.4.4 installed, run in my G3 Beige 233MHz with G4 500MHz upgrade?"
    As long as it's an IDE drive, it should work fine. Be sure you have only one of the drives set as the master, if you have more than one drive.
    Powermac G4-AGP   Mac OS X (10.4.4)   Fastmac 1.4Ghz

  • Best replacement internal Hard Drive for a Mac Pro 3

    I am looking for a replacement Hard Drive for my Mac Pro 3. It currently has an Intel ATA drive. Can I replay it with a SATA drive or a Solid State drive to upgrade it? Thanks.
    Craig

    I need to inform you there are no SATA. hdd in your or any Maqc Pro. Serial ATA only.
    Buy yourself a 250GB Samsung SSD $150 or 500GB $250 are best.

  • What is the best 2 TB hard drive to put in a Mid 2011 21.5" iMac ?

    Looking to Upgrade my hard drive to 2 tb what is the best hard drive to use?

    For internal, you can't go wrong with the Hitachi Travelstar. They work very well with the MacBook Pro and right now you can get 300 GB of 7200 RPM for less than 75 dollars at Newegg. You could try that and see if you really need an external given the type of music you're working with.
    If you decide to get an external, I would steer away from all-purpose drives and get one designed for audio, like the Glyph drives. Along the Apogee Duet simplicity lines, they're designed for music production and they just work. Most of them come with carrying cases. Just plug the Glyph into your MacBook Pro, plug the Duet into the Glyph, and that's it.

  • What are the best external backup battery choices for the iPod Touch 4G?

    Hello,
    I am so disappointed with the battery life on my iPod Touch 4G, even when I turn off location services and notifications and put it in airplane mode. 
    As such, I realize that I am going to have to get an external backup battery, even though I don't like the idea of carrying around yet another item. 
    What are the best choices out there, especially any ultra-portable (aka small and non-bulky) ones?  I came across this Juice Pack Air - iPod Touch 4G Case, which seems like the perfect solution, but it is on back order and seems to have been so for a good amount of time.  Who knows when it will be in stock again.
    TIA for any and all help!

    bumping up (I hope doing so is allowed.)

  • Macbook pro OS 10.7.5, what is the best external back up drive to use with it?

    Hi
    I have a Macbook pro OS 10.7.5 and am looking for an external back up drive.  What external back up drives do people recommend?

    T4444 wrote:
    Hi
    I have a Macbook pro OS 10.7.5 and am looking for an external back up drive.  What external back up drives do people recommend?
    We don't know which MBP you have so start by establishing what ports you have on the MBP that you can connect an external drive to. It'll have USB ports, but if they're USB 2.0, a full, bootable backup could take a very long time. If it's USB 3.0, backups can go a lot quicker. The USB external HD's are common and relatively inexpensive. If you have a Thunderbolt port, that's very fast but the externals compatible with it tend to be more expensive.
    If it's just USB 2.0 and Firewire, Firewire is faster but is being phased out. USB 2.0 is backward compatible with USB 3.0 so when you upgrade to a newer MBP, a USB 3.0 external can plug right in.
    Also, unless the external must be really portable, look for one that has a separate power source rather than drawing power from the connection to the Mac, since some externals need more power than the Mac is able or willing to supply.

  • What's the best new replacement hard drive available for a PB 1.67GHz?

    After my Leopard upgrade and some new iMovie projects I'm finally reaching the last 10 GBs of my stock 100GB drive. So I'm looking for a replacement drive. I'd really like to find a 7200 RPM drive with 16MB cache and a fast access speed. But from what I'm seeing those are only available in SARA drives.
    What's the fastest and largest ATA/100 drive you've seen? Obviously I've check out the usual online retailers, but the selection has been pretty sparse.

    The drive replacement went fairly smoothly. I ran into problems while removing the ribbon cable for the trackpad and keyboard from the main board. There is a very small fragile plastic clips that holds the ribbon in place. Unfortunately it broke while removing the ribbon. You could tell it just fractured like as if it was an old piece of plastic that had been sitting in the sun for years. It took about a dozen attempts to replace it and secure it in place before I was able to button everything up. Fortunately it's directly under a RAM chip, so I was able to wedge a nylon washed between the two and the pressure from the RAM is keeping it in place. The rest of the drive replacement was a breeze.
    Then came the restore. Unlike what I've read, I wasn't able to do a restore by just booting off the 10.5 DVD. I had to first install 10.5 (basic install), restart and then was prompted with a restore option at boot-up.
    It looks like it restored everything from my last backup. However, in launching a few common applications I use I have had to re-enter serials numbers. Which is weird because the same preferences were copied from the backup.
    But the good news is I now have 75GB free and the drive is quieter then the stock one.

  • What is the best external cd/dvd burner for imac?

    My iMac internal cd/dvd reader died on me. I'm looking for a best external solutionb for this problem. Any solution?

    I may suggest OWC, http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/optical-drives/superdrives/
    This is a case to put your own optical drive into. I have this case and I am impressed with it.
    I also have a Pioneer Blu-Ray 12x in the case for doing Blu-Ray Authouring. I got my drive for about $99CDN.
    Also, I watch Blu-ray movies on it with Mac Blu-Ray player.
    Does this help?

  • How do I format a portable Hard drive for both mac and pc?

    I have searched and came up with this answer which doesnt make too much sense to me 
    ( Either format it to MS-DOS from the DIsk Utility, or install a tool such as MacDrive into Windows and keep the drive in its current format, or install the NTFS-3G driver into Mac OS X and format the drive to NTFS in Windows.)
    I have a La Cie rugged poerable HD  I want to copy media files from both my work Pc and my home mac to it, and then plug it into my TVIX machine ( windows based media player) to access the files.  In simple terms, how do i do this? 
    TIA Wayno

    Yes, FAT is limited to 4GB. You can use exFat which does not have such limitations and works both on windows and mac. You may also stay with ntfs but with additional software such as ntfs for mac osx. 9.0 by paragon software. Using paragon software will give both access to read on write files on your hard drive on while used on your mac.

  • What is a great 1TB portable hard drive for a new macbook pro that works great with lightroom?

    I want to keep all my photos on the portable drive while working in lightroom. Is there much speed difference between USB 3 and thunderbolt?

    You might want to take a look at the LaCie Rugged series.
    You can get it in both USB 3 or thunderbolt....yes, thunderbolt is easily 2-3x faster than USB 3.
    Tom

  • What's the best way to serve media for ATV2, Macs, etc?

    I just purchased an Apple TV 2. I really like it and I'm not having any issues, etc. But here's my question. I've got an old iMac G4 (still running like a champ), a brand new iMac, my MacBook, my wife's MacBook, daughter's MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPod touch, etc that are all on my wired/wireless network at any given time. Each of these computers has some movies, music, photos that I want to be able to watch on Apple TV (and the Macs for that matter). I'm interested in some kind of server where I can put all of the movies, music, photos, etc from each computer in 1 place and that's where all of my media is served from. I would not only like to be able to play the media in Apple TV, but also access it via either iMac, or my iPhone, iPod touches, etc (although the last 2 are not as critical and not possible yet till Air Play comes out next month).
    Does anyone have any suggestions of what kind of hardware I should purchase to do this? Basically, I want a jam-up iTunes server that serves everything to each device (sorry, should have worded it this way sooner! . Maybe a MacMini server would do it? Or possibly just a Mac Mini or would Time Capsule do something like this?
    Any input is much appreciated!!

    Patrick Hindman wrote:
    Does anyone have any suggestions of what kind of hardware I should purchase to do this? Basically, I want a jam-up iTunes server that serves everything to each device (sorry, should have worded it this way sooner! . Maybe a MacMini server would do it? Or possibly just a Mac Mini or would Time Capsule do something like this?
    i use an old G4 Mac Mini running 10.5 Leopard, and it's on 24/7
    it runs in headless mode (ie no monitor) and i remotely administer it using remote desktop (or logmein if i'm out the house).
    i have a 1TB WD Mybook hanging off it connected via Firewire and that stores all my itunes content.

  • What is the best way to get Windows for your Mac?

    I want to be able to run windows on my Macbook Pro. How do I go about getting windows?

    System 7 is not the same thing as 10.7.  10.7 came out in 2011.  System 7 came out in 1991.  You can't download Windows, however you can install it on these virtualization engines:
    https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2741

Maybe you are looking for

  • Problems with my new K7T Turbo2!!! (6330)

    I just got the motherboard friday, and the same with a 1600+ chip.  I hook everything up (and this isn't the first time I've done this)...AND IT'S JUST NOT WORKING!!!  For a while the D-thingie that's on the USB slot showed that it was stopping due t

  • Data access in List Based components

    Hello , I am working with List Based components , List and a Combobox for practice purpose. I had written a Event Listener as  : public function handleList(event:ListEvent):void Why is that both of them are having two different ways of accessing Data

  • Basic type DELVRY03 and FM IDOC_INPUT_DELVRY

    Hi experts, i have a prblem using the basic type DELVRY03 and FM IDOC_INPUT_DELVRY. on transaction we19 am passing data to the segments of the basic type delvry03 so that i can update an outbound delivery...the problem here is that when am running th

  • Tween a Group of Groups

    How can I tween a Group of Groups to scale? I use my Pshop groups in a similar fashion to how Flash uses Display Object Containers. I have one group containing the rest of my groups serving as a 'master group' so I can perform global transformations

  • Please Help - Urgent

    Hi everyone, I�m having problems with Java Mail, I have just installed it along with the java activation framework, they are located in the following directories: JavaMail: C:\jdk1.3.1\lib\javamail-1_2[1] Java activation framework: C:\jdk1.3.1\lib\ja