Quote:
Originally Posted by kyteflyer
Remember that those portables are only 5400 rpm, too, so they really are as slow as a wet week. I was using one as my backup drive with SuperDuper! And it was not worth continuing. The USB2 desktop WD Elements drive was faster.  .
Only just found out today that WD bought Sandisk. |
I need the HDDs to be portable. I use them for backups, but I also use them to transport files to other locations and computers on occasion. Most of what I need them for is related to my photography hobby, so a lot of traveling with external storage takes place. I suspect if I wanted to have the fastest external file transfers, a high speed ethernet or even 5G wireless network storage system would be the way to go. However, I work with the files on my MBP's internal SSD, then when finished with whatever I was doing with them, I will back them up to an external location or two for safe keeping.
The main times I notice the slow transfer is when I need to transfer a few hundred large photo files, usually TIFFs and around 144MB each, to a Windows 10 computer to use aligning and stacking software that is not available for Macs. That is the main reason I bought the SanDisk Extreme 500 SSD. I think it will work very well in that roll.
I do use one of the 2TB USB 3 WD HDDs for Time Machine backups of my MBP. And yes it is snail on Valium slow!
But I can plug it into my MBP and let it run the backup in the background, so it is not to bad. I only do Time Machine backups about once a week, so it isn't a major issue.
I didn't know WD bought out SanDisk. I hope that doesn't degrade the SanDisk quality. I've always had good luck from SanDisk cards. I usually have good luck with WD drives, but there have been some incidents in the past that left me frustrated.