I need a 2 tb external HD for TM unencrypted backups. Durability, reliability and longevity are my primary concerns. Speed would be a plus but is not necessary as the other 3. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
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[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: External HD Recommendation Requested
MacBook Pro (M5, 2025)
It's entirely up to you but an unencrypted backup disk can be used to effectively create an exact duplicate of the source Mac without a password.
Durability, reliability and longevity are my primary concerns.
All valid concerns. Consider redundancy as well.
Speed is utterly irrelevant with Time Machine.
John Galt wrote:
[...]
Speed is utterly irrelevant with Time Machine.
Hey, my friend, not disagreeing with this at all in the every day use of TM doing its backups and for the occasional recovery of the miscellaneous file or folder, but in the case of restoring all files to a Mac, which could easily be 500 GB or 1-2 TB or more, certainly the speed of an SSD would be advantageous over that of any HDD, yes?
So, if one is comfortable with the up front cost of buying an SSD vs HDD, why not?
LaCie is perfectly ok, but so are the popular Seagate and Western Digital products. None are particularly any better than the others. Hitachi / HGST had been known for high quality long lasting hard disk drives (they originated with IBM) but Western Digital bought them a while ago, so I don't know if they remain as reputable as they once were.
If you don't know where to begin OWC is the place to start, because they support Macs exclusively, and they stand behind their products. I had one that was DOA and a different one that failed within their warranty period, and OWC replaced them without question.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-mercury-on-the-go-pro/usb-3.1
2 TB for $100, but it's easy to find twice that capacity (or more) from other sources for the same price.
Consumer grade hard disk drives these days are all more or less the same cheap disposable junk, which is the reason I advocate redundancy.
For durable, I like to get NAS rated drives (Network Attached Storage). They are more expensive. Then again, I generally put the drives in a multi-bay box or into a NAS.
NAS rated drives need to survive higher vibrations caused by the neighboring drives shaking the enclosure as their heads seek.
I've used consumer drives, and they always seem to fail in a few years when I put them into a multi-drive enclosure.
It has been a long time since I used a single disk in a 1 disk enclosure.
Check out OWC's offerings.
Yes, for the hopefully rare need to restore an entire TM backup, speed is a nice thing to have.
Thank you. But do you have a brand/model in mind that you would recommend?? Apple keeps mentions Lacie but I don’t know anyone who's used that brand.
Seeking durable and reliable 2 TB external HD for unencrypted Time Machine backups
