[facecard]

Please move this post if necessary.

I wanted to find out what is a good and reliable external hard drive to use with the Mac. I have heard good and bad things about Western Digital and Seagate. The failure rate of both of brands are not good maybe less than 2 years. I have used WD Passports but I don't know how reliable they are in the long run.

I understand that drives fail at any time regardless of the brand. However, I am looking for a good external hard drive to use maybe Lacie. I would prefer the portable kind of external drive.

Any suggestions?

[metllicamilitia]

Well if you can stomach the price, the new Samsung’s are reliable and have fast transfer rates. I’m currently using a Toshiba I bought a couple years back without any issues. I use it with my MacBook and PC laptop. When I bought it at Best Buy it was $100 for 1TB.

[anon(9602380)]

I used to recommend Seagate but would now say stay away from them. I've had a few of their high end pro drives fail. I will say that they are very good at replacing them if they are under warranty but I would not trust my files to a single external drive if it was a Seagate. One drive I would recommend is the G-Tech. You will pay a premium price for their drives but you will be getting one of the best external drives on the market.

They use Hitachi drives in their external enclosures. Hitachi is an extremely reliable drive. I actually have a G-Tech external on one of my iMacs that is 10 years old and still working as good as the day I bought it. I own 3 G-Tech external and love them. They are pretty quick drives depending on what you buy. They offer many configurations. As I stated though you will pay a premium price for them but you will find they are worth every penny.

I also recommend WD drives but only their top end drives. I'm running a pair of WD WD4002FYYZ Gold Drives in one of my NAS externals and they are excellent drives. But again they are pricey for higher end drives. In the end you pay for what you get. I also suggest buying at least 2 external drives unless you also use the cloud to backup your files in which case one external drive would do.

I am a firm believer in having redundant backups. I read and see to many people who don't and when their device fails they complain about losing everything. If it's important to you then have at least two backups. this way is one fails you don't lose all your files. Can't repeat this enough.

[imwjl]

There are studies on drive failure and there's where you should look. I'm an IT administrator in a sizable company so I see enough failure to know buy them in pairs. Have one mirror the other and keep it off site.