[Hugh Sakols Silver Member Posts: 80]

Computers & Displays

on: May 22, 2022 at 9:16 am

Does it matter what brand external hard drive one gets?  Other than differences such as USB vs thunderbolt, aren’t the drives all pretty much the same?  Are Lacie drives more reliable? Are they all coming from the same factory in China?  I’m unimpressed with the SanDisk drive that has given me so many problems.

[Andrew Rodney Participant Posts: 416]

Re: External Hard Drives

Reply #1 on: May 22, 2022 at 9:24 am

See the stats here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management" (pluralsight.com)”

[John Schwaller Participant Posts: 5]

Re: External Hard Drives

Reply #2 on: May 22, 2022 at 12:32 pm

With a drive dock, you can use any internal drive.  You do not need an external enclosure.

Here is an example of one I use:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01E80N2E8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Hugh Sakols Silver Member Posts: 80]

Re: External Hard Drives

Reply #3 on: May 22, 2022 at 5:24 pm

Great! I’m ordering a drive dock.

 

[Eric Brody Participant Posts: 69]

Re: External Hard Drives

Reply #4 on: May 23, 2022 at 12:41 pm

External drives are a great reasonably priced choice for both external storage and backup. Andrew gave you good advice about drive reliability from Backblaze, a great backup system, along with local and offsite storage of backups. I’m not a shill for OWC  but they have an impressive array of ways to store and access data. I use two of their Thunderbay enclosures for my backups with a RAID 5 setup and it has worked well for quite some time, neither cheap nor simple but worthwhile. Along with Carbon Copy Cloner, I have backups of my important files daily. OWC also makes a drive “toaster” that holds two standard internal drives. If you don’t want to go all out with the Thunderbay, these are pretty useful.

Good luck in your quest.

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