I am new to Mac's and the forum as well. I just bought a 15 inch MacBook Pro and I plan to use it to edit GoPro videos. I was wondering what an economical external hard drive to choose would be.
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)
I picked up a Seagate Backup Plus 4TB drive at Costco because the packaging mentioned Thunderbolt support (which is WAY faster than
USB-3 or Firewire), It turns out that the Thunderbolt interface is optional, but was able to get one for about $150 via Amazon. All-in-all it is a very solid drive with blazing speed and lots of storage.
If you want a portable drive to carry around with you, then take a look at the Western Digital My Passport Air - which slips in a pocket and has a TB at
USB-3 speeds.
" is firewire better than thunderbolt or USB 3.0?"
Your machine is not going to have FireWire, You'll want to go with Thunderbolt 2 then USB 3:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/
Specs are:
Thunderbolt 2 (Up to 20 Gbs)
then USB 3 (Up to 5 Gbs)
But call OWC to get the best advice esp as regards compatibility.
Keep in mind that a typical rotating drive can only source data off the spinning platters at about 125 MegaBytes/sec (about 1 Gigabit/sec).
A lot of the transfer rates information is pure specsmanship when the drive can't supply the data to fill those really fast transfer speeds. All it says is that those connections (including USB-3) will not be the bottleneck to data transfers.
Any of the offerings from OWC would work just fine. They are very reliable to deal with and also very knowledgable and friendly:
Thank you, also is firewire better than thunderbolt or USB 3.0?
I use the WD My Book. There are no special requirements for an external drive to work with a Mac and you can get a 4TB for like $130.
Best external hard drive for Macbook Pro
