USB SuperDrive and External Drive?

I've used OWC drives for years - the Mercury Elite Pro line is excellent and comes in regular and Mini size (handy to take with you). I don't use WD because of their cheap enclosures/chips (and because some of them don't even support booting which I insist on with all my bootable clones). Their drives are ok (as long as you get rid of the un-needed software on it while formatting it correctly).

OWC External Hard Drives and Storage Solutions for Macs

I use external drives regularly and occasionally archive some "precious" stuff onto Verbatim Ultra life Archival Gold DVDs (claim to be good for 100 years) - doing two different methods of backups is always good in case one of them goes.

Harold, I'm somewhat confused myself. First you say you bought a SuperDrive to read years of photos on CD/DVDs. Personally I wouldn't transfer them to an external hard drive. CDs/DVDs are much more reliable if used with reasonable care. As far as which external drive to purchase to transfer photos from your iDevices, some here recommended OWC drives from MacSales. I actually use WD drives and haven't had any problems but all drives can fail at any time.

There are no conventional external drives that you can use with any Apple iDevices.

You need to transfer your iDevice data to your Mac, using both iTunes and the macOS Photos app to transfer and store photos ( you can create a Photos Library folder onto the external hard drive ) to store all of your iDevice photos to this Mac connected external hard drive.

There are a few special storage devices for mobile devices. There are portable, bulit-in WiFi hotspot hard drives for mobile devices made by Western Digital and Seagate.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1330

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1660

http://www.seagate.com/consumer/stream/

There are special mobile lightning connected and built in WiFi Hot spot, USB flash drives made by SanDisk (now owned by Western Digital)

https://www.sandisk.com/home/mobile-device-storage/ixpand

https://www.sandisk.com/home/mobile-device-storage/ixpand-mini

https://www.sandisk.com/home/mobile-device-storage/connect-wireless-stick

http://www.adamelements.com/iKlips/iklips.html

This listing maybe incomplete and somewhat outdated, now. So do an online search for similar external data storage devices for iPads

Kingston Electronics makes some data storage devices for iPads/iDevices, now, too!

https://www.kingstongo.com/us/usb/datatraveler-bolt-duo-flash-drive-for-iphone

You can copy photos/images and videos/movies to these special drives, first connected to your Mac, then use the drive maker’s special iOS App to access these drives and compatible data from your iDevice.

Good Luck!

You’ve been fortunate then, most of the longtimers here mention the cheap enclosures. I tried one once, it failed within the warranty period and, after reading others’ opinions, I just destroyed it with a hammer - felt good.

lol a hammer aye? As far as I know most of their enclosures are plastic. A bazillion products use plastic of course and the enclosure would have no affect on reliability unless you tend to drop it regularly. Lots of old timers, (I've used Macs for 33 years), say many things that are often old wives' tales or may have been true at one time but still get repeated over and over. In any case, I did recommended OWC drives, not WD drives.

FWIW, I've had WD drives with the "cheap enclosures/chips" and have only had one fail after 10 years. And as far as I know, all drives need to be "formatted" correctly. 😎 Hiya.

You're welcome. I marked your artist site to peruse later.

Yeah well, I couldn't access anything on the drive, so I figured I might as well destroy it.

From what I've learned, it's the chipset that counts (and that is part of the enclosure). If you care to take a look under specs:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME6UM7T10G16/

They used to use a different chipset which was sort of rendered DOA by an OS update a couple of years ago (the update changed the way the USB and FW ports worked) which resulted in lots of problems. I had two drives with those chipsets and after much back and forth, they replaced the drives using new chipsets which were compatible).

I just spent 15 minutes trying to find some detailed tech specs on (any of) their drives - without success. No mention anywhere on which chipset they use.