Best Mass Storage Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc

BEST MASS STORAGE HARD DRIVE FOR BOTH AND PC MAC AND WINDOWS

Best Mass Storage Hard Drive For Both And Pc Mac And Windows

Cyberduck is a libre server and cloud storage browser for Mac and Windows.Computer hard drives contain all the data in your PC, from the operating system to music, movies and video games. An external hard drive, a USB memory. Best Malware Removal and Protection SoftwareUsing a USB stick as a local drive. To be able to access one hard drive simultaneously via both a PC and a Mac, you would be best to use a NAS (Network Attached Storage) which is a box that holds multiple hard drives, and has a network port, so you can plug it into your router, and it becomes visible on the network to other computers.

For fast file transfers, pick a unit with a USB 3.0 or 3.1 port. HDDs Provide Up To 10TB of Storage SpaceOnce you decide that you need to store files on a network drive, you then need to figure out what you mean to doВ with them, in order to determine what kind of NAS you need.Most external hard drives available at Staples connect to computers via USB interfaces. The most common hard drive interfaces are PATA, SATA and SAS.

Additional layers of data security and serving files to a relatively large number of users is typically where businesses need to be careful about NAS storage.Home users may not need to worry about large numbers of users, these days it's the number of simultaneous devices that make a difference. All of that is relatively simple for a NAS. LaCie Setup Assistant helps you.For example, a typical business scenario might be sharing access to Office files, like spreadsheets and Word documents, with your coworkers and perhaps backing up select office devices on a regular basis. USB 3.0 is supported, so expect speeds of about 120MB/s for read/write.You can use LaCie Setup Assistant to format your LaCie hard drive when it is first connected to a computer (Mac or Windows). You get 8TB of storage space in a 5,400 RPM drive. This thing isnвЂ™t portable, but itвЂ™s the perfect setup for home or office use.

Most consumer-grade and home-office NAS units have one or two bays, while models designed for the office have four or more. That's determined by the number of drive bays it includes and to a lesser extent what kinds of drives it can carry. NAS Buying 101Since a NAS device is, at the simplest level, just a container for a hard drive or drives (with some added intelligence), the number one spec for any NAS unit is its maximum potential storage capacity. So you'll need to understand the terms and features before you go shopping. You'll also need a more powerful NAS if you want to store big media libraries, like a collection of 100,000 stock photos, for your graphic arts studio, for example.Like any computer peripheral, the features offered by the various NAS units vary greatly to meet these different demands. But if you're serving HD videos over your home network to two tablets, a laptop, and your smart TV, all at the same time, you'll want a NAS with higher specifications for memory, processor, and network capabilities.

That means even if one of the drives fails completely, the RAID system can simply take in a new, completely empty drive and repopulate it with the data the failed drive was carrying. This tech allows the software that manages the NAS devices to distribute and duplicate the data it stores across multiple hard disks. (Some single-bay NAS drives will allow you to attach a second NAS device or an external hard drive, to that end.) You don't want the only copy of your data residing on just one drive on the network.The beauty of a NAS device is that it can use some version of a technology called Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). That's because of the lack of redundancy out-of-the-box. These drives will allow NAS makers to fit more drives into their chassis, which means more long-term storage capacity.We don't generally recommend NAS drives with just a single bay, unless they are to be used strictly for backing up data that will alsoВ reside on computers on the network.

Remember: Mirroring takes two physical drives. Err on the high side of capacity, though it'll cost more now, but you don't want to have to rebuy two hard drives for your NAS to get a higher effective mirrored capacity. Check out our RAID explainer for more information.Still, for most home users who aren't rabid video-file hoarders, a two-bay NAS should be sufficient, provided that you buy big enough drives from the outset if you'll be mirroring them, meaning simply making one drive an exact duplicate of the other.

With pre-populated-only NAS drives, the cost of the internal drives tends to be harder to distinguish from the overall cost of the NAS unit. Because most of these devices at least have a diskless option, you're really only concerned with overall drive capacity, their interface technology, and how much buying them will add to the overall cost of your NAS.If a given NAS is offered in both pre-populated and diskless form, we suggest checking out the cost difference and making sure that the drives that are provided in the populated model work out to a good value. These days this only applies to Western Digital as the vast majority of current NAS devices are hard disk-neutral as far as disk brand is concerned. Many other are purchased empty of drives, or 'diskless.' This was an important consideration a few years ago because it used to be that the NAS vendors who also manufacture hard drives would make sure their NAS devices could only take their hard drives.

If yours are not on the list, it doesn't mean they won't work, but if you are buying drives new, it's best to stick with the NAS maker's recommendations.Some drives from Seagate, Toshiba, and WD are tagged as specially designed for NAS use. If you already own a bank of hard drives you intend to install, you'll want to look for such validation. Take a look at these drive-compatibility lists before you buy. This might coincide with the hard drives they actually manufacture, or not.

Depending on which technology you choose, you can find IronWolf branded drives with capacities from 240 gigabytes (GB) on up to 18 terabytes (TB) as of this writing. The last, the IronWolf SSD and HDD drives, combine both technologies in a single drive that then has its own firmware logic to distribute data for optimal performance beyond what SSD delivers on its own. IronWolf Pro are designed for somewhat heavier business use while IronWolf SSD is meant for NASes that need solid state speed to serve up data quickly for high performance applications. Straight IronWolf drives are what you're after for outfitting a NAS drive in a home.

But if either disk fails, it's possible that all your data will be lost, so we don't recommend this approach. Striping by itself is chancy under some circumstances, it enhances the speed of reads and writes, since you're accessing two drives at once. One way you can do this is via 'striping,' in which the data will span both drives.

This is usually entirely dependent upon the software used to manage the NAS, however, so be sure to understand your NAS' software capabilities before purchase, particularly if you're a small-business buyer. To mitigate this, some JBOD NAS management software allows users to combine disks into one or more logical volumes and even apply redundancy measures across volumes. This is marginally safer than just basic striping, but any data you save to a given drive is still vulnerable to the failure of that specific mechanism.

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Best Mass Storage Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc