Looking for an external hard drive for a Mac laptop (1 Viewer)

[Jim Mcc]

What brands/models do you recommend for $100 or less?

Thanks.

 

[Todd Erwin]

Seagate sells several that are pre-formatted for MAC.

 

[Jim Mcc]

Thanks. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB is highly rated. Does anyone have any personal knowledge of that one?

 

[KeithAP]

I know someone that just bought two of those Seagate drives (at least I believe that was the model).


The interesting thing about them was that they appear to come formatted as NTFS volumes. When she plugged them into her Mac (I wasn't present for this) some software ran that downloaded and installed (with her approval of course) what appeared to be Paragon's NTFS software so the Mac could have full read/write access to volumes. This would be handy if you are moving the drives back and forth between Windows and OS X.


For her purposes, reformatting the drives with Disk Utility made more sense which is what we did. The drives seem to work fine.


-Keith

 

[MacTex]

A few months ago I got a Toshiba Canvio (older model) 2 terabyte external USB 3.0 drive to use as the bootup disk for an old white MacBook that my granddaughter inherited. The internal drive had died and I figured this would be a faster and simpler fix.


I reformatted the external with Disk Utility and partitioned it into the MacBook boot drive and two other partitions to use as backup for some other Macintosh computers the family had.

I purchased the drive (that came with a 32 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive) at Sam's Club on sale for $80 That configuration is now listed at $110 on the Sam's Club website but I was in the store last week and they were offering the drive with a micro smart card and adapter instead of the flash drive for the same $80. I don't remember if it was 32GB or 64GB SDHC card.


I just searched for similar drives and Amazon is selling a newer model for $85 without the Flash Drive.


Although it's a USB 3.0 device and the older Mac's USB ports are USB 2.0 the drive booted up the Mac just fine and operated great without any external power source (except the Mac's USB port).


That newer model in the 1 TB configuration on Amazon is just $50. Best Buy's price is $51.

Hope this is useful.

 

[DaveF]

Seagate sells several that are pre-formatted for MAC.

Shopping BestBuy last month for a new external hard drive, what I saw is "Mac Compatibility" costs an extra $50 to $100 to save you five minutes of running Disk Utility. Buy the best value hard drive and format it on your Mac.

 

[DaveF]

Thanks. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB is highly rated. Does anyone have any personal knowledge of that one?

All consumer hard drives are mediocre and now and you should assume it will fail in three years. It used to be better, but that's my experience the past three years. At the $100 for 4TB price range, I no longer find any difference between Seagate and WD or the others. The once vaunted Seagate quality seems to be gone; I've had both brand drives fail on me after a few years.

 

[Clinton McClure]

As long as the drive is Seagate or Western Digital it will be fine. ANY drive can be reformatted to work on a Mac in a few minutes so the "made for Mac" and "formatted for Mac" premium isn't worth paying for. I have occasional use drives which are 7-8 years old and work fine. For drives which are continually in use, I replace every 3-5 years.