Help request: drive recommendations for AC86U for OSX Time Machine

[Centrifuge]

I need to find a reliable 2 TB external hard drive to connect to my AC86U USB 3.0 port, to use with the Time Machine backup feature. I'd really like something that has an external power supply and not just bus powered, could use advice on this aspect also, but bus powered backups haven't always been reliable for me. Don't give a damn what it looks like. I'm backing up just 3 client machines.

It would be nice to have a partition for router use too, but Time Machine requires HFS+, which this router does seem to recognize. ASUS format recommendations page hasn't been updated for this router yet.. Any advice appreciated.

 

[maxbraketorque]

As far as the drive does, WD Red and Seagate IronWolf have been getting good reviews. To be sure you are getting a good drive, you may want to roll your own external drive. Lots of external drive enclosures available on Amazon.

 

[bbunge]

I need to find a reliable 2 TB external hard drive to connect to my AC86U USB 3.0 port, to use with the Time Machine backup feature. I'd really like something that has an external power supply and not just bus powered, could use advice on this aspect also, but bus powered backups haven't always been reliable for me. Don't give a damn what it looks like. I'm backing up just 3 client machines.

It would be nice to have a partition for router use too, but Time Machine requires HFS+, which this router does seem to recognize. ASUS format recommendations page hasn't been updated for this router yet.. Any advice appreciated.

Time machine does not need hfs for remote drives. I use a WD NAS with a 2 TB drive and I have no idea what the fs is! If you use a USB drive for Time Machine you would be best to hook it direct to the Mac. Or spend the bucks for a NAS.

Sent from my P01M using Tapatalk

 

[IronSchramm]

I had an ioMega IX4-200D NAS I was given and had repurposed as both a file server and Time Machine backup. Sadly the enclosure died, but the 4 2TB hard drives were fine. So I went on a quest to create two different devices, one for file storage and the other for time machine. I ended up buying the Mediasonic ProRaid HUR3-SU3S3 enclosure from Amazon and installing 2 of the 2TB drives in it. After a month of zero issues as an external drive for my Xbox One S, I bought another one to connect to my Asus RT-AC87U for time machine, and it's worked flawlessly for almost 3 months now. I back up three MacOS devices to it, and I will say the first backup of each device took a while, but the incremental backups after have been very quick. As far as the drives, I had them already like I said but they are Seagate Barracuda LP's. Anyways hope this helps.

Quick Note; looks like Amazon has refurb's of this enclosure for $20 less than I paid for mine, if that doesn't bother you I would highly recommend it. I might pick up another one myself.

 

[Centrifuge]

Thanks for all the advice, in the end I've ordered a Wavlink USB-C dual hard drive dock and a 2TB WD Blue, from Amazon. I realized my needs were more for a backup of long term storage, Pics, audio files, that would be used less frequently than if I had needs for NAS, there were some cool options in this category though, Snynology or WD cloud or diy along the lines of IronSchramm's suggestion. I was also tempted by the 6TB Seagate backup at Costco, but reviews were scary. I also felt that something diy and semi portable/interchangeable and the cloning feature of the dock appealed to me.

I've been toying around with some USB thumbdrives and HDD attached to my AC86U with different formats (EXT4, exfat, HFS), I see that it's touchy and sometimes it won't be able to "initialize /sda" after a health check, not sure what's going on but setting a disk to use Time Machine through the router, confused machines use to the shared drive as it was. The thumbdrives might of been a quality issue, PNY 8gb, but a reboot managed to get the 1TB HDD working smooth again, though the network connected read/write seemed anemic at 15mg up/down..