Advice on External Desktop Storage

Hardware
1

Hi,

My iMac is acting up. Probably due to the fusion drive option I took back in the day. And the amount of discrete files in my Dropbox Account is also becoming a problem it seems.

Anyways, to prepare for an iMac-upgrade where I’ll likely end up with less internal Storage, and to simply have a better setup I’m looking at external desktop Storage.

I have an Apollo Duo 2, but it’s not working that well to be honest - and even if it did it would not be covered by my Backblaze Backup.

I’ve looked at a “LaCie d2 10 TB Thunderbolt 3”.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with one of these or something similar?

The primary things I would like to have covered:

  1. That Backblaze will cover it

  2. That it’s workable to actually transfer and work on data on the disk from my iMac

  3. Ideally I would like it to be possible to have it connected to my iMac all the time, but if needed connect my MacBook Pro without it being disconnected from the iMac. Is this even possible? (The D2 above has the ports at least.)

I am more than open to other suggestions for a drive if there are better ones to look at.

Thanks for any clarifications!

Edit: Added an important “not” in the Duo paragraph.

2

Backblaze only backups up Local drives. It does not back up NAS drives- Apollo Duo 2 is a NAS drive.
Attached USB or Thunderbolt drives will be backed up by BackBlaze.
Working on files on an attached external USB or Thunderbolt drive should be fine.
Any USB or Thunderbolt drive attached to your iMac can be shared and used by your MBP.

3

Whoops. Had a missing “not” in that sentence. Thanks for pointing out! Yes, the Duo 2 was purchased to be an easily accessible extra storage for running Time Machine Backups etc. But it’s really underperforming to the point of being useless. Might be me doing something wrong, but it reaches a point where the time spent on trying to get it to work well on the network is just hitting a limit. heh