For this trip, I decided it would be a good idea to have a portable external hard drive to back up to. (I also keep remote backups via Backblaze, but I wanted to be able to use Time Machine.)<\/p>\r\n
So I bought a 2TB Western Digital My Passport SSD.<\/p>\r\n
And I\u2019m amazed at both its smallness and its speed.<\/p>\r\n
I saw the physical dimensions listed before I bought it, but didn\u2019t pay much attention to them. So I was expecting that it would be maybe the size of my hand, or maybe the size of a deck of cards. In fact, it\u2019s just about the size of a business-card case, about 4\" x 2\" x 0.4\", and it weighs less than 2 ounces. It would be easy to carry in a pocket or to lose in a backpack. :)<\/p>\r\n
It\u2019s also remarkably fast. It has a USB-C port (that\u2019s its only port), so I connected it to my MacBook Air with a Thunderbolt cable (maybe an ordinary USB-C cable would work just as well, not sure), and it ran a complete Time Machine backup from scratch overnight. (I think my usual experience has been that a new TM backup takes a couple of days.)<\/p>\r\n
It does get a little hot after it\u2019s been running for a while. But not too bad.<\/p>\r\n
It\u2019s also pretty. I\u2019ve had varying reactions to WD\u2019s enclosure designs over the years, but I really like this one. And it\u2019s sorta kinda blue\u2014it\u2019s the very dark blue\/black color that seems to be the fashionable color for tech stuff these days. (Similar to the color of my 2020 iPhone.)<\/p>\r\n
You can, of course, get much larger-capacity external hard drives for a much lower price. (I generally buy 8TB WD My Book drives for about $150.) But those drives are physically a lot bigger and heavier, and much less portable, and much slower.<\/p>\r\n
\u2026Normally I would just link to WD\u2019s website, but in this case the WD site doesn\u2019t offer the blue color. So I\u2019m linking to Amazon<\/a>, but if you want one of these in a different color, you can also get it from WD<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18992,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18991\/revisions\/18992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}