[Closed] Large external hard drive for Mac

USB-C not an option?

You don’t need a hard drive you need 2, otherwise your data is not backed up.
Have bought LaCie in the past but now exclusively use Cal-digit AVpro2’s and buy extra caddy’s to put my own drives in.
I check the back blaze drive reports and avoid buying any with high failures.
I also buy from different vendors so I don’t have drives from the same manufacturer or batch.
(Im a photographer/retoucher by trade and also work in moving image so generate many TB’s of data a year which needs to be backed up securely)

You don’t need a hard drive you need 2, otherwise your data is not backed up.

Whilst I agree, the OP said they had cloud backup.

As Cougar said USB-C will be cheaper unless the videos are in 4 or 8K and the pictures are humungously detailed or there's an upgrade path being prepared for.

I’ve been running a 2TB SanDisc SSD Since January. It’s USB-C and plenty fast enough

It’s absolutely bonkers just how cheap enormous amounts of memory now is, and the SSD drive itself is tiny

USB-C not an option?

USB-C is a very variable standard compared to Thunderbolt and can be a significant bottleneck when connecting to what should otherwise be a fast drive. Some USB C is very slow indeed but there's not really anything to see on a drive or a lead that tells you how fast or slow it should be. I've got two portable SSDs - a 'Sandisk Extreme' (like Binners above) and a 'Lacie Rugged' - the Sandisk looks like remarkable value but the read-write speed on the Lacie is almost six times faster than the Sandisk.

The sandisk is only in practice useful as a store for things - and for making itself and the laptop you attach it to nice and hot. You can't really work with big files on the disk - everything just slows down (i once had the bright idea of locating a virtual machine hosted on the drive - big mistake!).  But by comparison Lacie is really good  - through a chain of adaptors we've actually got is connected to an old iMac that is only Thunderbolt 2 but its still faster than the Sandisk and works absolutely fine is an edit space for 4k broadcast standard files.

I have the original D2 (Thunderbolt 1/USB 3) and it's been flawless. Bit confused by the specs of the latest D2 Pro though as it says it's USB 3.1 gen 2, but on Amazon, it says it has Thunderbolt 3 also?

Depends if you need the extra dock capabilities on the 1big Dock I guess.

Also, these are spinning drives. So great to offload files onto. But not edit your video files directly on them, if that's what you wanted.

Thanks for the caldigit recommendation, mrsmith.

Unfortunately the latest LaCie D2 is USB-C only, the Amazon description confused me too but after looking at the specs on the LaCie site it definitely is usb-c only, of course that is backwards compatible with a thunderbolt 3 port but apparently only offers half the transfer speed.

Whilst I agree, the OP said they had cloud backup.

I wouldn't consider my stuff someone else's computer to be properly backed up. Shit happens to stuff on the cloud. It's rare but it does go wrong sometimes either user induced or occassionally the host.

Personally I back everything up at least twice locally and then use 'the cloud' as a third option. It's worth doing as it is off-site however I would never rely on it as a sole or even just a second copy of my files.

usb-c only, of course that is backwards compatible with a thunderbolt 3 port but apparently only offers half the transfer speed.

It may be half the speed of Thunderbolt, but I am pretty sure a spinning disk will still be the rate limiting factor.

After the internal drive went pop on my 2012 iMac I started using an external SSD connected via USB3 and it is faster than the original internal fusion drive.