Opinions and quality change often, so make sure to pay attention to the dates of specific recommendations you find. SSDs are not worth the expense to be used as external drives, though they otherwise could be. Make sure the interface is USB3 or better. Physical Description As shown in figure 2, the My Passport SSD drive has: A USB 3.1 Type-C interface portBegin by selecting an external drive that is sufficiently large to hold your backup images — I recommend three times your disk space used, at a minimum, though larger is always better. To use with other operating systems, see Reformatting the Drive and Troubleshooting. Disk Drive Format Your My Passport SSD drive is formatted as a single exFAT partition for compatibility with updated Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.How should I re-format this for Mac 10.7.5 Do I use disc utilities FAT32 or is there some other format Not sure what 'Extended' format is and if it's suitable. It's formatted for Windows NT. Once you know, you NeweggI just got a WD My Passport drive, 1TB.
Formatting Wd My Passport External Hard Drive Mac OS X Operating SystemsTo partition and format the drive with Disk Utility, follow these steps: 1. WD Security software.partition and format a hard drive. My Passport for Mac portable hard drive, with the WD Drive Utilities and. Bigger is better.Installing, Partitioning, and Formatting the Drive. 2.securedoc decrypt hard drive This happens when Bypass Preboot policy is. While in there, open Utilities, and lastly double-click on Disk Utility. Choose Applications from the left-side panel. Mac game boy emulator redditSome choices are easy some depend at least a little on your personal setup. External drive technologyThere are several different types of external drives. Connection methods, and even power options, vary. If you want extra safety and breathing room, double (or even triple) my recommendation.The good news here is that in most cases, your backup requirements — even after tripling my recommendation — will likely be smaller than the average external hard drive currently available. That would be enough to hold two complete and compressed full-image backups, along with overhead information (such as recovery partitions) and a healthy collection of incremental backups as well.As I said, that’s a bare minimum, and there are certainly situations where it could end up not being enough, depending on how you configure your backups. (Screenshot: askleo.com)For that machine, I would purchase a hard drive with a capacity of at least three times 478GB, or around 1.5TB (1434GB, rounded up). Once written, it stays written for a long time. Longevity: the lifespan of magnetic media is well understood. Expense: though prices are coming down, SSDs are still more expensive than traditional hard disks of the same size. SSDIn my opinion, SSDs, or Solid State Disks (which use high-quality flash memory instead of rotating magnetic platters), aren’t appropriate for backup purposes. If your computer doesn’t support USB3, that’s okay it’s backwards compatible, and will operate at the slower USB2 speed.Someday, when you get a new computer, it will likely have a USB3 interface, and you’ll have an external drive ready to take advantage of it. Flash memory does wear out the more you write to it, but SSDs have a longer useable lifespan than their cheaper thumb-drive counterparts, and backups don’t write as much to the drive as you might think. The speed of an SSD is about reading data, and backups are all about writing it.What I didn’t mention was wearing out. The same can’t be said for SSDs.The primary benefit of SSDs – speed – is unnecessary for our purpose. ![]() Specifics: what external drive to getAs I said, drives change constantly. If you’re on USB2, the speed of a faster drive is wasted. The USB interface speed is the limiting factor, so focus on getting USB3 if you can. The maximum capacity is difficult to resist.Choose what your budget will allow, as long as it meets the minimum capacity requirements I laid out earlier.Externally powered #2: G-Technology 6TB G-DRIVE USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’ve not needed to purchase one recently, as my previous purchases were always of the largest capacity available at the time.Externally powered: Western Digital My Book Desktop External Hard Drive.These are available in capacities from 3 to 28TB.Again, if I needed an external drive, this is the one I’d probably buy. Were I to buy one, I’d probably opt for the largest, simply because you can never have enough disk space. They’re available in different capacities from 1 to 5TB (terabyte — that’s a thousand gigabytes). 1USB-powered: Western Digital 4TB My Passport Portable External Hard Drive.This is the drive I’d purchase if I needed one today. Without affecting the price you pay, or my decision to include them, using affiliate links may result in my being paid a commission should you purchase the product mentioned. (The “prior experience” is this drive, purchased in 2015, which is still connected to my Mac Pro, now running in my basement.) Opinions are easy to come byThis article, like any article on Ask Leo!, may contain " affiliate links". It’s the backup drive connected to my primary desktop machine and holds my nightly Macrium Reflect backups, among a few other things. By the time you read this, that could change. In researching this update, Western Digital seems to be getting slightly better reviews today. Fortunately, there’s usually at least one cresting while another is at its low point.Previously, I recommended Seagate drives, and that’s what most of my current (older) external drives are. The problem is that the industry is cyclic: a great hard-drive manufacturer five years ago might be horrible today.Unfortunately, that’s true for all the major hard-drive manufacturers: their quality appears to come and go in waves. More detailed information.Hard disks are a very difficult category of product to recommend. My philosophy is to get as high a quality as possible, because the cost to make good in the case of a failure would far outweigh the few bucks difference for a lower quality item (sort of like insurance).At the time of purchase I looked at a WD 3TB external “back up” drive. Some of the reviews for this model said it was noisy, but I have not found that to be the case at all – you have to listen very carefully to detect a quiet hum. It is used solely for back up and accordingly it operates all the time. Although it is designed for use as an internal drive, I installed it in a separate case (which has its own power supply) and connect it to the computer via a USB port. My backup strategy consists of two external 2-terabyte drives. Hardware eventually fails. As Leo has repeatedly stated, no drive lasts forever. I took Leo’s advise for back up procedures – so far, so good! ReplyIf you have only one external drive as your backup then you don’t really have a backup. It was cheaper than my 2TB unit, but I feel that one gets what one pays for. Imagine your current car getting 40 mpg and the salesman promises you that your new car will get “up to” 400 mpg. After upgrading the BIOS (something I shouldn’t have had to do on a new laptop) I maxed out at 100MB/s so don’t count on the advertised blinding speed improvement. In reality, using a USB 3.0 drive (results on a regular as well as SSD were the same) yielded 60MB/s. The manual that came with the computer indicated USB 2.0 speeds of up to (sales speak for “actual mileage may vary”) 60MB/s, and up to 600MB/s for USB 3.0. Other than a catastrophe such as a fire, I can’t imagine losing both external drives at the same time.Regarding USB 3.0 – My new laptop (purchased late December 2014) came with a USB 3.0 port. Then, approximately once a month I do a robocopy /mir from drive-A to drive-B.
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