[Miscellaneous]

In the ever changing IT world can someone recommend a cost effective and reliable external storage device to attach to my Mac? It would be ideal if I could also directly edit 4K video from the device, however that's not essential.

TIA

[stevelup]

Two different things?

If you use the storage device for backups, that's all well and good.

But if you're actually storing stuff on the storage device, where then is the backup for that?

USB will be fine for most stuff, but if you're editing 4K video stored on the external device, you might want to explore Thunderbolt which will double the cost.

If you refine the requirements a bit, I can make some recommendations.

[Miscellaneous]

Cheers @stevelup the thunderbolt option seems to limit choice and I'm not sure my 2014 MacBook Pro Thunderbolt will be much quicker than USB c? Although the spec is apparently okay it actually struggles to play 4K. Which makes editing more difficult.

Editing from the external drive is not really that important.

I'm leaning towards a Seagate One Touch SSD. Seems a reasonable balance of capacity, performance and price.

[stevelup]

If you remove the editing 4K on external drive requirement, then literally anything will do.

Just buy the best deal you can from a known manufacturer.

I've got a couple of the earlier Seagate ones (the ones with a geometric pattern on the case) and they've been fine.

It would only be worth going Thunderbolt if you were going for an external SSD.

[Flyingfemme]

I'm a big fan of the tiny Samsung SSDs. About the size of a stack of 6 credit cards - I have versions up to 1TB. They have security in the form of password protection that Samsung guarantee never to breach and require no special software or fiddling about. I canned my MS server and bought a handful of these so I could travel with everything (there is another with all the backups in a fireproof safe). Been using them for several years now.
But I don't edit video!

[Cessna571]

I set up a raspberry pi as a NAS (Network attached storage) drive by following very simple instructions on the internet and then just put the biggest USB I had laying around in it. (128GB)

It’s our “backup drive”, and accessible from all our devices, macs, pc’s, iPads and phones.

Very useful to have “everything everywhere”.

We use it for backup, but also stream music from it to our phones sometimes.

Now I’ve “proved it works well”, I need to set one up properly.

Not sure it could edit 4K video over the WiFi though.

[VRB_20kt]

Do be aware that whilst hard disc drives tend to give a bit of warning before failing, SSDs do not. They are incredibly reliable but failures are known.