What is the best external hard drive to backup my MacBook Pro?

Ok, thanks again for sharing your wisdom.

You mention these are suseptible of being shocked.. what does that mean? Shocked in what way?

I'm ordering one from Amazon tonight.

Michelle

shocked, slapped, jarred, bumped etc.

think of a record on a turntable turned OFF........smack it, bump it, no real issue

same thing turned ON.....record spinning and its needle.........bump it, smack it, jar it......bad news (not always, but dont let it happen).

Hard drive failure and handling

The air cushion of air between the platter surface and the head is microscopic, as small as 3 nanometers, meaning bumps, jarring while in operation can cause head crash, scraping off magnetic particles causing internal havoc to the write surface and throwing particles thru the hard drive.

⚠ Hard drives are fragile in general, regardless, ... in specific while running hard drives are extremely fragile.

PDF: Bare hard drive handling generic instructions

hard drive moving parts

Some of the common reasons for hard drives to fail:

Infant mortality (due to mfg. defect / build tolerances)

Bad parking (head impact)

Sudden impact (hard drive jarred during operation, heads can bounce)

Electrical surge (fries the controller board, possibly also causing heads to write the wrong data)

Bearing / Motor failure (spindle bearings or motors wear during any and all use, eventually leading to HD failure)

Board failure (controller board failure on bottom of HD)

Bad Sectors (magnetic areas of the platter may become faulty)

It seems Hitachi has a great history, my self had several WD and they crashed (I'm to clumsy)

FYI Hitachi (HGST) is a Western Digital Company.

Will try Hitachi to see if they survive better :-)

Thanks for all the usefully information.

hitatchi drives are definately the way to go. I use a HGST Touro Desk External Drive. It's one of the few options out there that is ready to use that is built with the reliability of a Hitatchi hard drive.

This thread has been really valuable in my search for a reliable hard drive...

I had my first bad experience with a LaCie 32 GB Flash drive and it was the first time any storage has ever failed on me so the needless to say I am never ever buying their products again and HD reliability is the #1 goal.

From what I read, it looks like I gotta get some hitachi drives! However I am more looking for monster desktop drive station rather than portables.

Hani Salaam,

I've had good luck with both LaCie (Seagate drives) - the 2big Thunderbolt series (I've 4TB and 8TB models) but have also had very good luck with G-Technology (Hitachi drives) which you may want to look at -> http://www.g-technology.com/.

If you've had bad luck with LaCie, try G-tech - as I said, they're Hitachi drives in excellent enclosures.

Good luck,

Clinton

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

Hani Salaam,

I've had good luck with both LaCie (Seagate drives) - the 2big Thunderbolt series (I've 4TB and 8TB models) but have also had very good luck with G-Technology (Hitachi drives) which you may want to look at -> http://www.g-technology.com/.

If you've had bad luck with LaCie, try G-tech - as I said, they're Hitachi drives in excellent enclosures.

Good luck,

Clinton

Thanks so much for the quick response.

This affirms my earlier leaning towards G drives, had no idea they were Hitachi's though!

Yep - G-Technology and HGST are both Hitachi companies. I have five HGST drives that I use for cloning my 960GB SSD in rotation and I've an older 2 TB G-tech drive that I use for working space.

Good luck with your endeavor!

Clinton

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

Yep - G-Technology and HGST are both Hitachi companies. I have five HGST drives that I use for cloning my 960GB SSD in rotation and I've an older 2 TB G-tech drive that I use for working space.

Good luck with your endeavor!

Clinton

Very cool, I'm a newbie so this is me trying to understand your pro speak...

To prolong the length of your HGST drives you copy the contents of your main 960 SSD to each drive in rotation.

And what do you mean by working space?

Thanks!

Awesome suggestions here!!! I have continued to read reviews and I"m sold on the G-Drive's. They just dropped the price by about $30 as well:

http://www.amazon.com/G-Technology-G-DRIVE-Professional-Strength-External

I might be way out there on this but I don't see much point in spending a lot of money on a backup drive. Afterall it's a backup. If the backup drive fails you can get a new on and run a new backup. Your MAC and backup drive would have to fail to lose anything. With that said I have been using a Western Digital Passport Drive for years and it's still chugging along and I can rest easy at night knowing my data is safe and backed up!

It might also be worth noting that I keep the drive in an inexpensive Water/Fire proof box just to be safe.

Hi PV,

is your reply above still current? Looking to replace my external hdrive I have a MBP 11,2. Thanks!

DK

I agree with ClintFromBirmingham about G-Technology drives. They are well built and have lasted me.

I currently use the 1TB version he mentioned above. G-Drives come in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB option. If I were buying today I would go with the 4TB version if I could swing it.