Any Recommendations for a HDD for Time Machine

I have recently purchased a 27" iMac with a 1TB Fusion Drive. I have been advised by Apple support that a 500GB HDD is sufficient for this purpose. I had thought that a larger drive would be necessary


I'd appreciate any thoughts on this and recommendations for an appropriate USB 3 HDD for this purpose.


Thanks

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Mar 17, 2014 11:22 AM

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5 replies

Mar 17, 2014 11:27 AM in response to Scribeswtr

You need a drive at least twice the capacity of your hard drive if you want to avoid really frequent needs to erase your backup and begin again.


You can use almost any available external hard drive. You can even make your own, which I would recommend. I would, however, be carefull about certain Seagate and Western Digital external drives some of which do not work well with Macs. I would suggest checking out OWC who specialize completely in Mac support.

Mar 17, 2014 1:34 PM in response to Kappy

Thanks for your confirmation of my suspicions re the HDD size. The guy I spoke to at Apple was helpful but didn't appreciate the ongoing use of Time Machine. He said that 500MB would be sufficient for a 1TB HDD. I'll go for a 2TB USB 3 external drive though not necessarily from OWC as I am on the other side of the 'pond'. Thanks for your help.

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Any Recommendations for a HDD for Time Machine

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