OK. Here is where I trot out the stories of "I remember..." I remember when a 2.5 GB disk (we called it DASD) attached to a mainframe and sold for $250,000 plus another $250,000 for the controller. I sold them. Fast forward 30 years. 2 TB for less than $100 and it fits in the pocket of my cargo shorts? What magic is this?
I needed a replacement for my external Seagate drive that just died on me.It was four times the size of this (at least) and died when the power adapter stopped working. This doesn't require separate power (powered by USB). The great thing about hard drives these days is the capacities are huge and the prices are also insanely low. The bad thing is this. Consider them disposable. Back up, back up, back up. I cannot overemphasize that. If you get three years out of a drive, you're doing well. This is a backup drive for me. I moved my home movies off of my internal drive onto an external drive and I use Super Duper on another drive to back up my internal (main) disk. This drive is used for backing up my movies and for Time Machine.
Right out of the box, I plugged it in and a window popped up and asked me if I wanted to use this as a Time Machine drive. Sweet! It's a perfect Time Machine drive and I like that they make it so easy. If you're using it for Time Machine you're done. But, I had to partition it first because I'm using 1 TB for Time Machine and 1 TB for my movies backup. Partitioning was quick, easy and painless. As I type this, it's running its first backup of Time Machine.
I don't know about the speed or reliability and I don't particularly care. As a Time Machine drive it doesn't matter how fast it is.. And, for backing up my movies, when (not if) this drive dies, I'll replace it and just copy over my backup from the other drive. I've lost many drives over the years but I haven't lost any data. Backup drives speed and reliability are meaningless. They back up in the background and you should always have at least one more copy of your data. When it dies, throw it away and get another one.
A three year warranty on a $100 drive makes me very happy. If it lasts 3 years that's less than $35 a year. Well worth it.
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Portable |
|---|---|
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 1 |
