Is there a hard drive that works best with Macs?

New iMac user here. I have a WD portable hard drive that I used with my PC. It worked fine for me, but I have read online some problems people have encountered with these. It is only 120GB, so I thought I would just upgrade all together - size and manufacturer. Is there one that the Mac-heads prefer?

Thanks!

IMHO...I think all hard drives work pretty well these days...with no brand standing out as a real "stinker"!

- Nick

You're seeking opinions - of which there are plenty! Most are based on personal experience, which is rather limiting. Read the independent reviews of whatever brand you think you might want. 'Popular' brands include Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital (in purely alphabetical order).

hughvane said:

You're seeking opinions - of which there are plenty! Most are based on personal experience, which is rather limiting.

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Yeah...these sorts of questions usually are not very helpful for the OP. Like you said...many folks have their favorites...and at the end of the day...the thread ends up with something positive (and possibly negative) about all brands...thus not really helping with the decision process.

- Nick

To add to what's been already said, there really isn't a best hard drive for Mac. If a hard drive is built well then it should work. The difference is that it's best to format the hard drive for whichever OS you are planning on using them on. If you are willing to use FAT then you can use the hard drive for both.

The one thing that can be considered more Mac specific is that some hard drives come with Firewire which is more common on Macs than Windows. Firewire 800 is faster than USB 2 so if speed is important to you then it's something you might want to consider when buying a new one.

EndlessMac said:

To add to what's been already said, there really isn't a best hard drive for Mac. If a hard drive is built well then it should work.

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Well said!!!

- Nick

EndlessMac said:

Firewire 800 is faster than USB 2 so if speed is important to you then it's something you might want to consider when buying a new one.

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AFAIK, they are also considerably more expensive.

To the OP, I've had very good luck with WD (all my HDs are WD drives except for one and I swear by them simply because of my personal experiences) but they are by far not the only good brand. As has been noted here, I'm sure people will swear by Seagate and other brands as well. My advice would be to get one with a good warranty and back up often. If you have those two, you shouldn't be worried.

I am a fan of Western Digital. Only warning is the new Green series Internal drives seem awfully cheap. Did a search on New Egg and many people are having failures with the WD Green drives. In person they feel light compared to the other drives both by WD and Seagate.

I agree with what has been said, any good drive will be fine. I usually check reviews on New Egg of late before I buy.

texican said:

I have a WD portable hard drive that I used with my PC. It worked fine for me, but I have read online some problems people have encountered with these.

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And if you read reviews of any of the other Manufactures, you would probably (i would say definitely) read similar reviews ........ Its "Murphy's Law" with "The Law of Averages" that says certain amount of things will fail, if a certain number is made.

Its been said above but any *good* brand will do you fine. I use WD because i have never had a failure, but the biggest thing for me when i 1st bought one, was the fact WD was a plug and play type.
Meaning i didnt have to do any partitioning or formatting. Plugged it in, started SuperDuper and backed up and all done in 18 minutes.....

On backing up are you using ONLY Time Machine ??? If so I and all posters above would recommend using SuperDuper ^^^ Link or CCC~CarbonCopyCloner. These both do a bootable copy of your HD as where TM doesnt ..... Just FYI is all and a little more help into your new Mac

Cheers

And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are only 1 or 2 manufacturers making all these drives anyway for all the various companies.

Seems to be the norm these days with electronics.

Thanks for the responses.

TattooedMac - Yes, I was planning on just using TM. (I have not used it yet.) I guess I need to look into the others you mention.

Thanks again

schweb said:

And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are only 1 or 2 manufacturers making all these drives anyway for all the various companies.

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How true is that!? What's in a name? Quantum became Maxtor became Seagate; IBM became Hitachi.

Here y'go, read away: Comparisons of Hard Disk Drive Manufacturers and Brands of USB, Portable and External Drives for Computer Storage and Backup and What's the Best Brand of Hard Disk Drive?. Note the dates of those pages.

In a Google search of 'Hard Drive Brands', I was dismayed to note how old some of the pages were, eg. 2002, 2005. There have been huge improvements in hard drives since then.

I have a 2TB WD with built in RAID that i use for TM. (2 1TB drives in one box) so when one drive does fail, the other is there for me. I thought about Carbonite but they do not back up external drives.

Here are a bunch of them, that came up on on a google search.

My Book Mirror Edition WDH2U20000 Hard drive array - 2-bay

My $0.02 - stay away from Samsung and Toshiba. Other than that, in recent experience, I recommend WD, Hitachi and Seagate.

cwa107 said:

My $0.02 - stay away from Samsung and Toshiba.

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I agree with Toshiba. I've had two good friends succumb to the terrible computer quality of Toshiba notebooks. Both had their HDs die on them. I don't know if they had Toshiba drives but I wouldn't trust a Toshiba computer product unless it was my last option.

cwa107 said:

My $0.02 - stay away from Samsung and Toshiba. Other than that, in recent experience, I recommend WD, Hitachi and Seagate.

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I 2nd 3rd 4th and 5th that advice! I have had many Samsung drives fail and some almost brand new.

Also is this going to be internal or external? A friend who I have hoped would switch to Macs for years did. Everything worked great except his Seagate External. It uses Auto Power ON. Using the Firewire 400 port it would not switch on when plugged into any Mac we tried it on. Worked with USB 2.0 but FW is so much better. I googled the issue and 100's were having the same issue. It's not the Drive itself but the case/interface board. My friend is getting another enclosure and we will take out the 1.5TB Seagate and install it in that and the issue will be gone.

I recently picked up a small 500GB Seagate Firewire HD to use for TM backup and have been very pleased with it. It draws all its power from the Firewire 800 port on my MBP and is small enough (not much bigger than my iPhone) to keep on a shelf near my recliner.

Razormac said:

...and is small enough to keep on a shelf near my recliner.

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Keeping within easy reach of your recliner is the most important part right? ;D

EndlessMac said:

Keeping within easy reach of your recliner is the most important part right? ;D

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Absolutely!