

Best harddrive for mac store video professional#
In January 2015, Backblaze – a decent sized cloud backup provider – published some data about their experience with the hard drives that make-up their cloud offering in a report called What is the Best Hard Drive? As an IT professional by day, I find the report to be incredibly interesting, especially because many in the tech industry don’t agree with the conclusions. I just wish all of them would publish that information. They are getting experience with hard drives on a scale that makes failure rate statistics actually meaningful vs. While cloud storage may not be the best way to backup your photo library, there is a huge side benefit to the cloud storage frenzy going on right now with providers like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook (kind of), and others. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking every hard drive from some manufacturer is terrible because you had one fail on you after a short 6 months and their customer service was awful. Just like everything, manufacturers leap frog each other over time. However, not only is there no way you have had enough experience with hard drives to draw that type of conclusion, this isn’t something that stays constant over time. If you are like me you may have sworn off some brand or other because at one point you were bit when one went bad and you didn’t have a good backup. No matter how long you have been using hard drives, you do not have enough experience to know which brand is most reliable.

Although there are some things you can do to prolong their life – more on that later. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. Evil because these drives with large amounts of storage (1TB up to 6TB) are mechanical and they will fail. Necessary because digital photography means we have a lot of pretty large digital files that have to be stored on drives. These hard drives are a necessary evil for photographers. Magnetic hard drives, the big ones you are using for at least your long term storage, are ticking time-bombs. If you haven’t had it happen yet, just give it some time and it will – the click of death.
Best harddrive for mac store video free#
You are free to disagree with the recommendation, but please read on to get some of the gory details behind it before you do. Again, stay away from the 3TB size (what is up with 3TB?). Western Digital Red drives actually have a smaller failure rate than Seagate drives, but they tend to be more expensive than HGST or Seagate without more reliability (there are other benefits).You will want to avoid the 3TB size, specifically the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB that had an unusually high failure rate. Seagate Barracuda drives narrowly have the best price to performance (as far as failure rate) of any brand.While all sizes of these drives seem to do very well, the 2TB and 4TB size had smaller failure rates that the 3TB size. HGST Deskstar is the top brand to trust.As of the creation of this article, here are the top 3 consumer brands:.Some last beyond that, but the odds increase significantly after year 3 of using a magnetic drive that it will fail. Plan to replace your long term storage hard drive(s) about every 3 years.There are several suggestions on tools to do that here.

One good way to do this would be a “secure erase” utility. New drives tend to fail early (within the first 12-18 months) or late (after 3+ years), so after you get a new drive it is good to put it through a “stress test” before you trust it for your photo library.Avoid “green” drives as they are designed to be more power efficient at the cost of performance, which might be OK for long-term storage except that they are also designed to start and stop a lot more which tends to cause early failures (sort of like how a light bulb blows when you turn on the switch).Use 2TB or 4TB SATA III (6GB/s) 7,200 RPM 3.5” (not the 2.5” drives for laptops) drive(s) with 64MB cache (avoid the 3TB size).The Answerįor long-term storage of a photo library, photographers should consider the following: This article explains which brand is the best hard drive for photographers to use for long-term storage of their irreplaceable photo library. Professional and hobbyist photographers alike face a common problem – storage space.
