Comparing Seagate, Hitachi GST, and Western Digital disks of various capacities, Backblaze found that Hitachi GST’s drives had the lowest failure rate at any capacity, followed closely by Western Digital, with Seagate ranking a very distant third. “If the price were right,” Backblaze said, “we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives.”īut nothing’s set in stone: Western Digital now owns Hitachi GST, and Seagate has been working to improve the reliability of its drives. With over 27,000 drives on hand, Backblaze last year published the most comprehensive independent test results I’ve seen for consumer-grade hard drives. Hard drives aren’t all created equal, and they aren’t built to last forever: good drives typically last for around three years of very active use, and great ones for five years. Without a computer or another enclosure surrounding them, these hard drives are called “internal hard drives.” They’re small metal boxes akin to old-fashioned record players, with one or more spinning disks (“platters”) that get accessed by a “ read/write head” (shown above). The vast majority of Macs in homes have mechanical hard drives (rather than chip-based SSDs) inside. Hopefully you now know which options above to pick from the list of best formats for external hard drives, which can save your bacon when making the wrong choice can lead to a situation where an external disk just won’t plug-and-play.Photo credit Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons user Sting A Quick Primer On Internal Hard Drives Picking the wrong one can turn into a real pain when you have to backup and reformat an entire drive because it won’t work for its intended purpose. Picking a format for your external drive can be pretty confusing. In fact, most devices have an internal SD card formatting routine, so we recommend you simply let the intended device format the card. exFAT is still a good choice if your DSLR (for example) supports it, but follow the manufacturer’s recommendation. With SD cards, your choice should be entirely driven by which formats the devices you use support. However, that’s set to change in the future. Of course, if you’re also going to use your thumb drive on your current Linux machine, exFAT won’t work at the time of writing. Especially if you also want to use your thumb drive with iPads, iPhones and Macs.įAT32 is a fallback if you want to use your thumb drive with older devices that don’t support exFAT. Which means you may want to use large files, such as HD video files, on your thumb drive. With the fairly cheap yet large flash drives we have today, there’s some overlap in the use cases for thumb drives and external hard drives. SD cards and USB thumb drives are still an important part of our digital lives, so which formats should you pick? The choice for the best format for external hard drives involves different considerations compared to other forms of external storage. Unfortunately, Linux does not yet have support for exFAT, but that is reportedly set to change with the release of Kernel 5.4. The most compatible option is FAT32, but as we mentioned above it has a hard 4GB limit on file sizes.
#Best external hard drive for older mac windows
However, Linux supports NTFS, which makes for a decent go-between if you have both Windows and Linux machines. Linux has its own proprietary EXT formats and if you are only going to use your external drive with a Linux machine, you can safely go ahead and pick that format. Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Linux are becoming more popular by the day, but are still relatively niche overall.
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