Why have colored disks?! You do know that won't be able to see them inside the metal, hermetically sealed covers!
OTOH, it might be fun to watch the arm mechanism moving to each track. Perhaps the edge of the disk has contrasting color bands and a strobe light inside that would tell you if it was spinning at the correct speed like those fancy turntables!
Just make sure the pre-asymboled units state the brand of drive and, more importantly the model. Simply saying "Seagate" or "Toshiba" is not enough. That's why the warranty length will help.
Also consider the connection method. If you have USB 3 on your Mac, don't be tricked into buying a USB 2 only drive unless you can live with a very slow speed. Slow speed may be OK if the drive only creates small backups while you do other things, but frequent access (reads/writes) while working with graphics may not be much fun!
Lastly, if you can afford
two drives, get
one for TM and
one for a cloning (bootable) backup. 2TB minimum, 7200rpm, 3-5 yr warranty, largest cache you can get, USB3 at least (it will work on your Mac, even if it has USB2).
Enclosures seem to have increased in price. OTOH, there are now dual, drop-in "enclosures" for <$32. Those drop-in boxes make rotating backups extremely easy, but I fear the cheap ones are Asian knock-offs. Buyers beware.
Does anyone have warranty info on the Seagate portable drives mentioned further up this thread? Only info I could find with a minimal search was for bare drives.
Um...Jim, if the external drive is a Seagate, the drive in the enclosure will be a Seagate. The issue of what drive might be inside only exists where the external drive is made by
IE: LaCie. There aren't actually that many companies in business any more that assemble external hard drives (as opposed to manufacturing them) - in fact, right now, LaCie is the only major one I can find. I wouldn't recommend one - overpriced and no idea what's in it. There are a few other minor ones offering super-rugged enclosures with things like 80GB drives in them (!!) Not exactly a thriving market, by the looks of it.
The Seagate drives I linked to are USB 3 - I wouldn't suggest anything else at the moment.
The warranty on the Seagates is 2 years (it's in the PDF on the linked page) - which is about par for the course at the moment, unless you buy Western Digital Caviar Blacks, or WD Enterprise Golds, which are internal full-size drives and almost twice the price and require an enclosure on top of that. Both of those models have 5 year warranties. I have owned a number of full-size WD Caviar Blacks over the years and put a few in laptops - but 2.5" WD Blacks top out at 1TB. Given that these drives are intended for backup, you certainly don't need an Enterprise drive (which is designed for a heavy workload) and personally, I'm finding the portable backups much easier to use and very reliable. No messing around with power adapters either.
I can take them with me easily too - and I can get two of them for what I'd pay for equivalent WD 3.5" Caviar Blacks and external cases.
There are hybrid SSHDs and SSDs available too, of course, but they remain more expensive than HDs and for backup, the extra speed isn't really warranted. I did treat myself to a spectacularly small Samsung T3 a while ago, but that's for my Lightroom photo library and speed does matter there. (Plus it's ridiculously portable, of course!) They typically have longer warranties than traditional HDs with moving parts.
