Searching for a Portable external Hard Drive that is Compatible with Ventura!

I m using all of these with Time Machine on various Macs, including iMacs, MacBook Pros, running Ventura (there are a lot because I have 2 or 3 Time Machine backup drives for each Mac):

Western Digital My Passport

Western digital My Passport Ultra

Western Digital My Passport SSD

G-Drive Mobile SSD

Samsung SSD T7

Samsung SSD T5

Apricorn Fortress HDD

Apricorn Fortress SSD

La Cie D2 HDD

I suggest the following because they can all interfere with use of external drives and cause them to appear to stop working after a MacOS update:

No anti-virus

No third party disk software, utilities or firmware

No cleaner utilities

No security software other than the Mac OS itself

I've had no issues with the following brands:

• LaCie
• Western Digital
• SanDisk

One thing I always do, though, is reformat the external HD. I don't like (or need) any of the "extras" they throw onto the hard disk.

For me, the important factors are connection type and capacity.

I use the following as it's a bit less expensive than an SSD in its own case and much smaller.

The bare OWC SSDs can be had in 1, 2, and 4 TB sizes. (And smaller than 1 TB if desired). Depending on your MBP and its ports get an adaptor that is either USB-A or -C.

Just some food for thought.

Addendum: If a 1 TB size is sufficient this OWC drive is extremely small and efficient: 1TB OWC Envoy Pro mini 

debifromherndon wrote:

Thank you for taking time to answer my post.

Can you elaborate on "No third party disk software, utilities or firmware?" I have no anti virus. no cleaner utilities nor security software other than MAC.

Do not install any anti-virus software. The Mac has its own malware protection, and 3rd party A/V solutions just interfere with your ability to use your Mac effectively.

macOS does not need any 3rd party software in order to talk to an external disk. If the external disk you purchased includes software, DO NOT USE it. The Mac is perfectly capable of reading and writing to the disk without unnecessary vendor provided drivers. At most you may need to reformat the external disk so it uses a macOS file system. Generally APFS (Apple File System), or the older HFS (macOS Extended (Journaled)).

Similar to not installing 3rd party anti-virus, do not install utilities that claim to clean your Mac. They have a tendency to clean essential software and data files along with what they consider trash.

No security software, is more along the lines of no anti-virus. The Mac is rather good a protecting itself, unless you have a habit of installing any software you find just laying around the web, or if you always click on links that say your Mac is infected, etc...

Speaking of "Your Mac is Infected" pop-ups. These tend to be advertisements that LIE LIE LIE, and no web page can scan your Mac for malware. If a web page could scan you Mac, they could just steal all your data. Since they cannot, they just Lie and encourage you to click on links and either give them money, or get you to install software that can steal your data.

Can you elaborate on "No third party disk software, utilities or firmware?"

Almost every drive will come formatted for Windows (NTFS). It will also have bundled software to allow you to write to NTFS because macOS can only read NTFS.

Don’t install any of that software. Just use Disk Utility to Erase the drive and format it with a Mac format. To format the drive, you need to select Show All Devices from the View pop up menu. You can then erase the entire device. Use GUID and APFS or Mac OS Extended.

I have portable drives from SanDisk, Crucial and WD that work just fine with macOS Monterey and above.

I have mostly Seagate IronWolf drives in my Synology NAS. I have a Samsung 1TB SSD external drive, and I have an older 1TB Toshiba drive that has lasted a long time.