10-17-2007, 12:40 PM

Originally Posted by MacDad77

i am leaning more and more towrds the "bulid-it-yourself" route. i have been searching NewEgg and found the Icy Dock aluminum enclosure in SATA 3.5" with Firewire 800 and a Seagate 500GB drive. all for $220 before shipping?

Anyone have experience with Icy Dock?

Christian

FYI: you can get a My Book Pro 500GB with firewire interface for $182 b/f tax on Newegg. Linky

10-17-2007, 12:47 PM

For those of you looking for HDs, check out your local electronics store. WD, and Maxtor both released new HDs, and the old models are at huge discounts.

10-17-2007, 01:36 PM

Currently, apple has a sale on applestore for a 500Gb Iomega drive for $129.00. I'm definitely considering it. By the way, I have 2 Lacie Porsche drives, one a 160Gb, the other a 250Gb and I've never had any problems with them.

10-17-2007, 01:46 PM

Apple has a special going on at the moment for an Iomega 500gb for $139.95, here's the link:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...nplm=TQ081LL/A

What do you think?? My only doubt is that it's USD instead of FIREWIRE.

Otherwise, I'm probably sticking to Lacie. I have 2 Lacie Porsche drives and although I have heard some horror stories on them, I have never had any problems with mine.

10-17-2007, 11:14 PM

If it's only a backup drive or for extra storage then USB will be fine; but if it's a working drive (like a Photoshop or Final Cut scratch disk, or a media "server") then personally I'd pay a bit more for FireWire.

I've been using a USB drive left over from my PC days for awhile, and just got round to upgrading to a bigger FW800 drive... I won't be going back to USB. Also, I don't have anything else that uses the FW port... but plenty of things I need USB space for.

10-18-2007, 12:39 AM

Which one?
Your preferences, reviews, etc.

10-20-2007, 07:02 AM

Hi all -

My first post on these forums...

I'm currently backing up my three Macs to a single partitioned external drive (Crossfire firewire) -
G5 (dual processor 2.3) running 10.4.8
G4 running 9.1
G3 (B/W) running 8.6

I'm now planning to get a second backup firewire drive, and this time I need a bigger one, as the amount of stuff on my G5 is increasing rapidly.

However, I seem to have run into a problem, in that all the 500GB hard drives I have checked out seem to list OS 10.x as a minimum requirement. I'm not sure whether this minimum is for carrying out tasks like formatting, partitioning etc, or whether the drives will actually not mount or work properly in OS9 or 8.6 ?

I'm also wondering whether all the firewire drives could be used as a boot drive for my G5, or whether some might require drivers etc to mount.

Unfortunately neither of these questions really seems to be covered in the info/spec sheets I've come across - could anyone shed any light?

The drives I've been looking at are:

Freecom Hard Drive Pro 500GB
Formac Maxi 500GB
LaCie Quadra 500GB (is bootable)
Western Digital MyBook Pro 500GB
Maxtor One Touch III 500GB

Cheers!

10-20-2007, 07:11 AM

Other thing to note about the Iomega is that I believe it has an 8MB cache, as opposed to 16MB for most of the 500GB drives about.

Which really just backs up (pun alert ) what Levi said: fine for backup, but maybe not the best for disk intensive uses, like higher-end video applications.

I'm about to get a new backup drive myself, but I want it to double as extra video space, so I've kinda ruled out the Iom...

10-20-2007, 11:09 PM

I am looking into buying an external hard drive for my PowerBook. I want to use it for backing up photos, mp3s, and general files. But, in the next year I will be using a lot more audio, photo, and perhaps even video files and I think I have about 20GB's left on my internal drive.

I want to be able to retrieve or work directly with files on the external hard drive but don't necessarily want the waiting time to take "forever" or sacrifice quality (if that is even an issue.)

Also, would it be to my advantage if I get an external hard drive that allows me to boot from it? Would this feature be great if say something goes wrong with my internal hard drive or perhaps the possible catastrophies that go along with my learning a bunch of audio/visual programs.

If you have recommendations on particular external hard drives, I would appreciate it. I am guessing that 200-320GB is a great place to start. But, that is my guess coming from a clueless standpoint.

And this info helps:

PB G4, 1.5 GHz, 1 GB, 80 GB HD, 512 L2 cache, 167 MHz Bus.

Thanks

10-23-2007, 04:40 AM

I am prepared to make the jump to Leopard next Friday and I am very excited. One of the many reasons that I am excited is, of course, due to Time Machine. The problem is that I do not own any external hard drive. So, for the sake of using that feature, as well as making a back up copy of my current hard drive before installing Leopard, any recommendations would be great. I am currently using an iMac Intel Core Duo 20" with a 250 GB hard drive. I have about 100 GB remaining, so any recommendations on an external hard drive that isn't any more than $150 would be great.

Thanks!

10-23-2007, 06:48 AM

There's a lot of great options available while staying under $150. Even Apple themselves have an Iomega 500GB USB2.0 drive available right now for $139. Shop around, check Buy.com, Amazon, Newegg.com, and others and just look for what you think is the best balance between capacity and price.

One thing that you should consider though is whether or not you plan on the drive being solely used for Time Machine. If you do, then a USB2.0 drive will be fine, and you can get more capacity for the money. If you plan to begin to use the drive to actually work from, then I would suggest getting something with Firewire, which will cost a little more than a purely USB2.0 drive, so you'll get a little less capacity for the same money. Firewire is going to be a lot faster (don't let USB2.0's rating fool you - you won't see anywhere near that performance in actual usage), but you should be able to get a 320GB drive that has Firewire and USB2.0 for under $150 as well.

10-23-2007, 11:32 AM

http://www.amazon.com/Acomdata-HD320...d_i=B000F7DNRU

10-24-2007, 05:06 PM

Some people I know don't like their Maxtor drive for whatever reason. You should be fine with big brand names like WD and Seagate.

10-25-2007, 09:58 AM

So I am currently looking for an External Hard Drive, not beacuse I don't trust my Mac, but because I am outright paranoid when it comes to backing up data now since my PC died, and came very close to losing 5 months worth of digital photos, and 20 GB of un-edited home video that I was preparing to do, I managed to save the information onto another computer, but I have to transfer it over, plus I decided that with an external Harddrive I'll be able to back stuff up.

After spending a couple hours on various electronics store websites, I THINK I've settled on the LaCie 500GB USB 2.0 FA Porsche Design External Hard Drive, It's an all metal case so they say, and by the looks of it it's brushed aluminum, which will go very nicely with my iMac. 500 GB seemed excessive to me, but the price is right (on sale, so it costs the same as a 160 gb)

Now my question to everyone out there: reviews I've searched on this LaCie Harddrive are fantastic, there's a few out there that explain they're using it on their Macs, the Specs show that it's Mac Compatible, and initially set to a FAT32 file system, which will allow me to transfer between Mac and PC if necessary too. So.... I am just wondering if anyone here has any experience with this Harddrive.

10-25-2007, 10:36 AM

every porsche drive I have used has failed, every time. I recommend going with another drive, maybe a MyBook.