Thanks.
These will only be for storing projects as they are completed - just audio, no video.
I have a mac with a thunderbolt connection, which I guess is the fastest for this set-up.
Yes, I know I will need 2, and was thinking of a raid, but they are pretty expensive, as I see.
I'm gonna be a little bit of a contrarian here, sometimes what I do best
If possible I'd emphatically stay away from any drive that spins. It just doesnt make much sense anymore. By percentages, something that spins is far more like to fail than something that doesn't.
I do audio for a living. When Covid hit most of the industry sent folks off to work from home. It was a massive IT challenge for us since we have up to 50 editors between audio and the Avids. They sent us audio folk home with a Pro Tools rig and 3 or 4 WD portable drives. One of course for backup, another for SFX libraries, one for my primary soft synth libraries, and one for use as the primary audio drive. I was skeptical at first, about running heavy Pro Tools sessions on what is after all advertised as a "portable backup" drive. Yet surprisingly, I've been retching that little drive around 10 hours a day 6 days a week with nary a hint of failure or being too slow.
If it were me (and I know it's not
) I'd first take a look at what exactly is filling up your Mac's internal hard drive. With the massive size of almost all computer applications these days, it's now more than ever, important that you protect that space. Even with the newer Mac's what slows things down quickest is a bloated internal drive. It was almost unheard of in days of ore to fill a hard drive with just applications. Clearly not so now. It honestly might be a good time to bite the bullet and do a fresh install of the OS while taking a good look at what you need and what you don't. Never fun but always performance rewarding. Then pick a new audio drive. I've always tended to pick smaller-sized audio drives since there's less to lose in a catastrophic failure. I'd rather have two 1-gig drives than one 2-gig drive. That used to be called the Pearl Harbor Theory
That said so many decent drives to pick from these days with little upfront investment, it's a bit of a no-brainer. WD and LaCie (despite their legacy reputations) are great choices, and as I mentioned I've used a WD in large sessions under Titanically difficult deadlines for 18 months now. BTW: Our first two audio drives at our facility were Digidesign 9 gig drives, which, believe it or not, were somewhere in the ballpark of $1500.00 apiece.
From there I'd look at two more portable drives. One to back up your primary audio drive (on-site) and another to use for Time Machine (on-site). Finally, I'd look into iDrive (or something similar) as a cloud backup. I like iDrive because it's affordable and it's extremely streamlined in that the service only backs up computer files and it does it without any effort. IDrive will also back up your external audio drive as well, so if your projects are important to you, you'd have a 3 audio drive back up at a very reasonable cost.
Just my 2 cents and hope it helps