Which USB do I have ? Portable HDD & Powered Hubs

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Level 1

11 points

Which USB do I have ? Portable HDD & Powered Hubs

I am looking to add a portable hard drive and note that several offer USB 3 these days. My iMac is a mid 2011 intel one and so I am guessing I have at usb 1 or 2. I cant seem to find a reference in the "about this mac". Is it possible to upgrade to USB 3 ? I am not doing any video work so I dont know how worth it.

I am looking at a WD 2 Tb portable HDD. If I buy a Windows one I guess it can be formatted in Disk Utility to remove any windows drivers or software so I can use Time Machine? Any recommendations for the HDD?

I also want to update my usb powered hub ideally to a 7 or 10 port one. Are these much of a muchness ? Any recommendations ?

Many thanks

Steve

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), 2.7 GHz intel Core i5 4GB 1333 MHz

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 10:39 AM

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Answer 1

mende1

Level 10

93,538 points

Oct 24, 2013 10:45 AM in response to stevenjf

The Mid 2011 iMac has got USB 2.0, so get a USB 2.0 external drive. Note that USB 3.0 disks may also work, but they will work at USB 2.0 speed. Instead of using USB, I recommend you to buy a FireWire or Thunderbolt external drive, which are much faster than USB 2.0 drives.

If you get a Windows-formatted external drive, you can format it in Disk Utility with "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". If you want to use it with PCs, you may want to use FAT32. Time Machine will format the external drive automatically once you choose it as the backup drive

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