Most Reliable External Hard Drive For Mac
These best portable hard drives for MacBook Air/Pro/iMac data backup/restore/transfer are reliable, fast in transfers and not easily to be destroyed. But external hard drives for Mac are a dime a dozen, making it a highly labor intensive process to pick out the best one. Here we selected out a list. Skype.
Some of the packaged drives have one year warranties, but the inner workings would have had a 3 or 5 year warranty if they'd been bought separately. I've decided to use my left over drive enclosures and assemble my own. It's cheaper and easily upgradeable as new, big drives come on the market.
I've benerally been happy with WD's although one of my pre-packaged WD drives failed for no apparent reason - not readible even outside the box - and it had a one year warranty I had just passed. LaCie drives are no better than the innards. If you really want the most reliable go with CalDigit.
They pre-test all of their products BEFORE it is shipped to you. I have quite a few running all of our critical data at the university where I run my departments IT services and they have all been running 27/7 for a number of years with ZERO problems. Quicken 2016 mac why is there no running balance showing for credit card payment. The externals are RAID 0/1 or JBOD with drives hot swappable. Their customer service is also the best in the business.
Their VR Mini is Bus powered and almost as fast as SSD units. I do not work for CalDigit. But their drive work for me. If you look at Google's experience (they had a couple of papers on this recently) - manufacturers didn't seem to make much difference. They all fail sooner or later.
The important point (as has been mentioned) is that you have a strategy that allows for any given disk to fail without unduly affecting you. Personally, I like the G-drive enclosures - they're aluminum, run cool and quiet, and come with every interface known to man. They're pricey but seem to last for years. LaCie is on my no-buy list since their policy is that they do not offer support for non shipping products.
Since the product line changes from year to year, you end up with products that they won't even fix if you offer to pay. There are really less than a handful of makers of hard drive mechanisms, so all the others mentioned here, like LaCie, Caldigit, etc., are actually using drives OEMed from Seagate, WD, or Hitachi. True, the case, power supply, and drive interface do enter into the equation, but not that much.
The reliability of the drive will generally be based on the quality of the drive mechanism. So for example suggesting that LaCie's drives are inherently more reliable than the drives offered by the people who actually make LaCies drives, is a very difficult notion to support IMHO. Having purchased and used heavily well over a dozen high capacity drives over the last couple of years, I can make some general observations -- I think many of WDs external drives have had a lot of interface issues resulting in them not being recognized at bootup, requiring them to be powered down, and then powered up again before use, but that's an irritant, not a reliability issue. Seagate had a run of problems for a few months, and took a big black eye for it. But they solved the problem, and the Seagate 1.5TB drives I am using are reliable and trouble free. In the end, I've been happiest with the Seagate Firewire 800-equipped drives.