External hard drive recommendation?

[presentationgenius]

The title says it all, really. I've got two Macs that both should have TimeMachine pushing to an external HD (paranoid much?). Anyone got any recommendations/thoughts/observations?

Both machines use DropBox for more or less everything so this is just a belt-and-bracers thing and the amount of data involved is pretty small.

Cheers....

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Samsung have a first class reputation on SSD's

 

[Ethan39]

WD and Seagate are both brands I've made use of in the past without any issues. They seem to review well online but I have seen backlash about their reliability long term.
Still, I've found them to be perfectly fine on a personal level and the cost per GB is practically unbeatable. My current drive from Seagate has been running for 6 years with daily use and I've never noticed any issues.

 

[presentationgenius]

@Chris Ashdown and @Ethan39 Thank you both! Time to hit Amazon.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Here we go if you need to backup 2 devices.

Qnap dual bay NAS ( £150 ) in Raid 1 with 2 Western Digital Gold drives fitted should give you a design life of 5 years 24/7.

Really bad drives, avoid Seagate at all costs including their brand they own like LaCie, Maxtor and many more. Products for the bin at best.

WD was good but they looked at Seagate with what they get away and quality is getting bad in the last 2 years.

Toshiba it is a hit and miss not great but not bad either.

If no NAS is up your liking 2 ugreen enclosures ( £25 ) and 2 x WD Gold Series ( 1TB around £75 ) is the way forward if you care about data.

For external SSD's are all pretty much shit and unreliable but if it has to be an SSD external Samsung T5 ( not T7 ) is a very good SSD drive. Other brands are poor at best.

Also set some budget aside and get a perpetual Acronis True Image license and get rid of this Time Machine STD software, it is old out dates slow tech at best.

 

[DontAsk]

I've had no problems with my WD external HDD.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

(paranoid much?)

Nothing to do with being paranoid and more a reality thing. For years hardware Apple is sourcing is the lowest quality tech you can get starting with their SSD's they use. Since 2016 a mix of cheap SanDisk and Toshiba sub standard OEM at best.

If somebody needs backups hands up for Apple devices. The failure rate on SSD's on the 2020 Macbook Pro 16 nands and T2's is alarming high. Can't complain as it is good for our business.

Combine that with the APFS file system that was developed by some crack heads over a weekend data failures on Macs is very high. HFS+ was already a nightmare in regards to stability but against the odds they managed to develop an even worst file system.

Seagate and Apple make sure we stay in business thats 80% of all cases.

My current drive from Seagate has been running for 6 years

99% sure this is actually a Samsung hdd drive in a Seagate enclosure. Not a Seagate produced one. Why somebody would run a consumer product rated for 1 year 24/7 operation push it 4 years past design is beyond my understanding.

I've had no problems with my WD external HDD.

As good as they were from 2012 - 2018 they made big cuts in their tech and become less reliable specially the charger and palmer series are sub standard at best.

 

[presentationgenius]

Thanks @Nico Albrecht Some of those seem a bit over-the-top for a two person company but they certainly look like the business!

 

[Nico Albrecht]

This has nothing to do with over the top and buying a consumer drive is false economy. A 5 year product versus a 1 year product at only double the price.

 

[gpietersz]

If you are interested in reliablity, the Backblaze numbers mght useful:

Hard Drive Failure Rates: A Look at Drive Reliability

We take a look at the Q1 2020 and lifetime performance of 129,764 hard drives used in the Backblaze data centers.

www.backblaze.com

Why somebody would run a consumer product rated for 1 year 24/7 operation push it 4 years past design is beyond my understanding.

Bathtub failure curves? Its its still going after one year it should be OK for a few more. Also, I would have thought age related failures are easier to see coming through things like SMART data.

Also, better two consumer drives either in a RAID array or rotated for backup than a single more reliable ddrive

My current drive from Seagate has been running for 6 years with daily use and I've never noticed any issues.

Most hard drives will be replaced before they fail. There is a significant risk of failure though.

Really bad drives, avoid Seagate at all costs including their brand they own like LaCie, Maxtor and many more.

I did not know they owned LaCie. One to avoid then.

HFS+ was already a nightmare in regards to stability but against the odds they managed to develop an even worst file system.

Wow. I did not realise APFS was that bad. Did a bit of reading up on it and it seems to confirm what you say. I suspect its that Apple's priority is consumer devices and they think everything should be backed up to iCloud. Still, its quite an achievement to make it less reliable.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

coming through things like SMART data.

Smart can't be trusted, period ! My best advise never trust SMART it is not meant to run diagnostics and a marketing tool at best. I get drives in all the time smart 100% and they are wrecked.

A even better example is Apple again and SMART. If you click about your mac under NVME you can see the SSD with smart supported but if you go to disk utilities and click info about the SSD you will find they deactivated the function in the OS. What kind of Manufacture would have a drive with smart support deactivating it. If it goes you wouldn't even get a warning as smart reporting is off in MacOS since at least 10.12. All those M1 MacBook's SSD are waiting to just blow up in under 2 years due to cheap sandisk tech and no smart reporting. They even had to tweak the firmware on the SSD to slow them down to prevent early wear.

t realise APFS was that bad.

Bad is still giving it compliments to be honest. The worst file system for the last 30 years. A good example how bad it actually is look at time machine. It took Apple more than 4+ years since release of APFS in 2016
to allow time machine backups on APFS volume. Time machine is their inhouse dev. backup software how can they develop a file system and need 8 years development to support it. But again time machine is really bad to start of with so it makes sense if you combine 2 bad products it takes time.

reliability, the Backblaze numbers

Great source and love them but their last couple years stats have high capacity drives running so not really good for the end-user to choose from. 2014/2015 they had good stats on the Seagate drives with the 2 and 3 TB models fail as high as 38% in under 1 year. Sounds awful but guess who bought all those 2/3 TB Seagate drives ending in DM001. You guess right .... Apple , all those 2013 - 2016 Apple iMacs with 2 and 3TB fusion drives used them. To add insult to that they actually recalled some and guess what they replaced them with the same faulty model again. Any Apple fusion drive is a ticking time bomb waiting to fail and those 2/3TB Seagate's are next to impossible to recover.

 

[Jawaid Karim]

I have for the last few years, setup and been using a cloud system on my own server using 'Nextcloud', have been really happy with it. The drives I currently have in there are Toshiba ones, and have had no issues with them. I did originally have Seagate ones, but over time they had faults, so swapped them out for Toshiba ones.

 

[Avast Business]

Hi. What about NAS environment? You can pick up something like an Asustor or a QNAP, use the HDDs you like and just use it as your own external storage hub. Besides, you can the use it as a media center with something like Plex...

 

[Hooble]

Hi. What about NAS environment? You can pick up something like an Asustor or a QNAP, use the HDDs you like and just use it as your own external storage hub. Besides, you can the use it as a media center with something like Plex...

A NAS environment does offer you the data protection too. And as Teon points out you could also use it for hosting a number of apps useful to yourself too.

 

[Avast Business]

A NAS environment does offer you the data protection too. And as Teon points out you could also use it for hosting a number of apps useful to yourself too.

Yes, and you can use it in a broader sense than just as a simple backup solution.

 

[Ozzy]

It looks like you may have had the answers you need already, but to add to the mix and maybe confuse matters...what network router are you using and does it support network storage?
I have a Netgear that has network drive sharing built in over 1GB wifi so my iMac is able to use it as a backup device and also media sharing for services like @Avast Business mentions. I do video editing as a hobby on my iMac which I store the source and output files to, and can also access them from my Windows PC. We can then play them on our smart TV in the living room. Just by plug any external HDD to the router, although personally I'd recommend going SSD if you can for speed.

 

[James (iimttd)]

Smart can't be trusted, period ! My best advise never trust SMART it is not meant to run diagnostics and a marketing tool at best. I get drives in all the time smart 100% and they are wrecked.

A even better example is Apple again and SMART. If you click about your mac under NVME you can see the SSD with smart supported but if you go to disk utilities and click info about the SSD you will find they deactivated the function in the OS. What kind of Manufacture would have a drive with smart support deactivating it. If it goes you wouldn't even get a warning as smart reporting is off in MacOS since at least 10.12. All those M1 MacBook's SSD are waiting to just blow up in under 2 years due to cheap sandisk tech and no smart reporting. They even had to tweak the firmware on the SSD to slow them down to prevent early wear.



Bad is still giving it compliments to be honest. The worst file system for the last 30 years. A good example how bad it actually is look at time machine. It took Apple more than 4+ years since release of APFS in 2016
to allow time machine backups on APFS volume. Time machine is their inhouse dev. backup software how can they develop a file system and need 8 years development to support it. But again time machine is really bad to start of with so it makes sense if you combine 2 bad products it takes time.


Great source and love them but their last couple years stats have high capacity drives running so not really good for the end-user to choose from. 2014/2015 they had good stats on the Seagate drives with the 2 and 3 TB models fail as high as 38% in under 1 year. Sounds awful but guess who bought all those 2/3 TB Seagate drives ending in DM001. You guess right .... Apple , all those 2013 - 2016 Apple iMacs with 2 and 3TB fusion drives used them. To add insult to that they actually recalled some and guess what they replaced them with the same faulty model again. Any Apple fusion drive is a ticking time bomb waiting to fail and those 2/3TB Seagate's are next to impossible to recover.

You sound like you've been through the mill with all of this? I run a few Samsung T5's from my evil MBP2018 via a Caldigit hub (the fancy expensive one, which is also connected to an eGPU, because apparently spaffing £££'s on a laptop isn't enough for a 4k screen) of late the read/write is appaling on all external SSD's. do you have any idea what that could be about? Is my life about to become hell with drives? it took 10 mins to transfer around 200mb last week. If this is the case I'm going back to DAT tapes ?

 

[Nico Albrecht]

It's the Caldigit unit using a slow budget controller and combine this with massive overheads it will drag your speed down as well.

Specially if you use the T5 supplied usb c cable.

To increase any speed I'd recommend using a certified thunderbolt 4 cable to get the party going again.

 

[James (iimttd)]

Right, so this is an expensive paperweight? https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07CVMV8VC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Right, so this is an expensive paperweight?

In short yes. Caldigit spend all their money on a fancy expensive enclosure and marketing to Apple people instead of putting some decent controllers and cpu in there.

You would be better off with a Dell Thunderbolt 4 enclosure and not such issues with slow data. Same price better components on the inside but there are some trade-offs to consider such as Firmware update only via Windows and Dell machine and some other minor ones. But if you want a simple dock with full speed and monitors much better choice than this Caldigit crap.

 

[James (iimttd)]

In short yes. Caldigit spend all their money on a fancy expensive enclosure and marketing to Apple people instead of putting some decent controllers and cpu in there.

You would be better off with a Dell Thunderbolt 4 enclosure and not such issues with slow data. Same price better components on the inside but there are some trade-offs to consider such as Firmware update only via Windows and Dell machine and some other minor ones. But if you want a simple dock with full speed and monitors much better choice than this Caldigit crap.

Cheers, I'll keep an eye out for something like that as I need 4 usb c ports and ideally an SD card reader.

 

[Ian J]

Not wishing to insult anyone else but if I have a drive problem I go straight to @Nico Albrecht as he is the expert on these matters

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Use a remote service?

 

[WaveJumper]

I use one of these and Microsoft Cloud:

LaCie 5TB Rugged USB C Portable Hard Drive - Apple (UK)

Apple Store Search Results

www.apple.com

 

[RayanW]

If you need a good speed SSD with a 10 year warranty you should go for Samsung, they have a some real good SSD with good speed of writing and reading

 

[Avast Business]

Hi! Out of curiosity, did you make a choice? What are you going for?