I have used this drive for years. I now use it with my MacBook Air M1. Why use an old-style mechanical drive when much faster SSD drives are available at low prices? Because mechanical drives that use old-style magnetic platters are much more reliable than SSDs.

If you store an SSD for years, you probably will lose all the data. I have recovered data from HD drives after 20+ years of storage. In fact I prefer this relatively thick HD drive to the thinner ones that are now available!

To be honest when I saw this for the first time I was very skeptic. I had never seen a hard drive from transcend, I'm mostly a fan of their SD cards. I travel a lot for my work, with long drives and long flights, so when I saw this hard drive on sale, I thought it was a good price for the added security. I was worried that it would be a slow low quality drive encased in studded rubber. 6 months later I can confirm that's not the case.

The drive is well encased, its two layers of protection rubber on top of a hard case. Its built like a tank. Its great because I can throw it into any backpack or bag and really not worry about it being compromised. It has taken a drop (or three) but the level of shock absorption the rubber takes doesn't even make me cringe on impact. Genuinely amazing. I would even feel confident using it around water- NO SUBMERSION OF COURSE, but due to the double layer and the rubber, light splashes run right off.

The hard drive itself has been as reliable as all my previous drives. Its speeds fluctuate. I don't calculate numbers, just more of a feel. It does fairly well with premiere with 1080p footage, it gets slower if you may be compiling and edit that composes of footage from different parts of the drive. I can understand that an amount of seeking would out it under some stress. In light room it does well most of the time. It slows down when working with the wieldy huge images from my A7rII sometimes and that cab slow momentum a bit, but I would say its not much slower than other non ssd hardrives I've used.

There's a button on the drive as it comes with some back up feature software thing, but I never use it because I prefer to do back ups manually and meticulously, so perhaps if you like backup software, you'll like the one button back up feature with this drive

Would 100% recommend to a friend
And would 100% purchase again.

I'm very happy with my purchase. Its fmworks perfect

After a series of power outages, I discovered my Mac's Time Machine backup external HD and the second external HD I use for photographs had both stopped working. Luckily, my computer and the internal HD were still functioning perfectly so I did not lose any critical information. It became obvious to me that I needed a more reliable system of backing up, especially for my photographs which are the most important and irreplaceable of all my files.

I decided I cannot trust a single backup source and I no longer trusted a full time external HD due to my previous experience. After a bit of thought and research, I decided to back up my photographs on multiple portable hard drives. These Transcend drives fulfill the purpose perfectly. I no longer do photography professionally so I don't have a huge inventory of images. What I do have are personal photographs which are more important to me than any of the photographs I did for pay. I'm willing to spend a little extra time on these images. After every download of files from the cameras, after converting the Raw images and after doing necessary adjustments, I manually copy the Raw and final image files to each of several Transcend drives. It's a bit time-consuming but it's worth it to me to feel the photos are now secure.

As a final archiving, I make at least one print of my favorite photographs (few photos actually fit in this category) on cotton rag inkjet paper with pigment inks and I store the prints in museum boxes.

I've been following this procedure for the past six months and the Transcend drives have been performing as expected.

02/05/2016 UPDATE: I've continued to follow this procedure for photo backups with no problems. It's about time to replace my aging Mac Mini and I think I'll probably jump to the new iMac. While I think I'll try an Apple Time Machine again and possibly add a SSD for another photo backup drive, I'm satisfied with the multipleTranscend drive option.

Love everything about it, but the usb port on the unit is flimsy and fussy. It has to be *just so* to stay connected. The other gripe is that unusual connection means cord replacement makes me nervous. Otherwise I love it.