External Hard Drive Question

Posted 29th Jan 2023

I'll shortly be buying a Mac Mini to replace my ageing PC. I'll need some external drives to move my images across from the PC drives - do I need to get external drives that are USB 2/3 compatible; or is it a case that I'll have to transfer across to the Mac Mini HD then back onto the new external drives.

Any advice appreciated

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29th Jan
I believe it's possible to implement USB 3 without supporting USB 2, but it was never very common. There USB2-only ports hung on for a long time so I doubt it's been dropped off hard drives yet.

Although USB3 is well over a decade old at this point so are you sure your old PC doesn't have even a single USB3 port?
Author
29th Jan
I'll have to check
29th Jan
Just buy a external hard drive and copy everything from your windows pc to it you want then your done.. if you wish to copy it onto the Mac from the drive you can otherwise just leave it on the external hd
Author
29th Jan
Thanks for that, my concern is if I buy a USB 3 only external drive can I actually copy from my PC which is USB 2
29th Jan
you dont need an EXTRA external drive as such. From your new Mac mini, all you need is to access the data/images on your PC drives. You could do this via wifi lan or you could physically extract the drives from the PC and place them in compliant USB disk enclosures. You can also utilise cloud storage. The decision to buy any external drive can be put off until experience dictates a better solution.
29th Jan
Or embrace the 21st century and move it to the cloud?
USB3 is backward compatible to USB2, the caveat is that USB2 data transfer is much slower...