As long as it runs on it's own power supply and has a fan you'll be fine. I got a cheap Freecom external drive 18 months ago; it's been switched on almost permanently and as it houses my iTunes library it's accessed frequently.
I second the comment that the drive should have a fan. I have a Maxtor One Touch II that doesn't have a fan and it gets very hot if it's running constantly for more than a few hours. Maxtor doesn't recommend running it continually for more than 5 hours at a time so I have it set to sleep whenever it's not being accessed. On the other hand, I have an old EZQuest with a built-in fan and it never gets warm. I also have a portable EZQuest drive that doesn't have a fan, but it, too, stays cool, so maybe EZQuest just builds better drives .
Check with the manufacturer before purchasing a drive - they'll usually be honest about the level of heat generated by their drives.
Claire
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Claire Rottenberg
Author of ebooks on Mac OS X
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I'm looking to buy an external HDD (~250GB or 320 GB) to store things from my PC to eventually move to my mac. Any brand recommedations? Interface recommendations? I can't spend over $150. I've found Western Digital, LaCie, Mextor, and Seagate drives on Amazon for under $150, but they are mostly USB. I know it is slower, but is USB otherwise ok to use with mac?
I have an external hard drive that i used with my former ibook i know have a mac book and when ever i plug it in the macbook doesnt recognize it. I have plugged it into other macbooks ad its works fine. any ideas?
Mac Specs: 20" iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, 500GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 128MB ATI Radeon X1600
External HD?
I want a 500GB external HD for Time Machine when I get Leopard. I was looking at a MyBook Essential but they have some reviews about them just refusing to be detected by the computer on Amazon, although these are a vast minority of reviews, it still unnerves me.
Should I get one anyways? Or can anyone suggest a good one? The only reason I was drawn to a MyBook was because they are the sexiest HDs around
i have a 500 MyBook external HD and it works wonderfully. i have not had any trouble with connection. it uses only USB and the speed is just fine. right now i am in the process of partitioning a section of it in NTFS to see if i can get this program to allow me to read AND write to it in osx. i will let you know if it works if you would like. the only problem i have with ehd's on a mac is the NTFS blunder. FAT32 can only hold files up to 4gb... no larger. this is a bit of a problem for me so thats why im doing NTFS to see if i can get it. My Book essential is great quality for a great price. how much are you getting yours by the way? i got mine last december for around 300 or so. good luck.
-Philip
Recently my PC died and I lost all my data on my hard drive, so I bought a macbook. I realized I need to build an External drive. But i have a few questions... I will be building my own, so i need an internal drive and external case. I wanna spend around $100-115 I want about 250-300gb of space.
My Questions-?
What kind of drive do I need for mac? IDE or Sata?
What connection do i want? USB or Firewire? which is better?
Anyone have recommendations for a good external case?
As far as getting the mac to read the drive how does that happen?
Whats the best way to back up my internal drive?
I have already decided on a Seagate as the drive brand.
if you look on www.newegg.com, you can find 500gb external hard drives for less than $130, which is a really good deal. If you absolutely have to build the external, I would suggest buying from newegg as well, but it would be cheaper and less time consuming to buy one.
i don't think that the drive type matters for the mac, as long as it matches whatever external case you get. the most popular is probably ide
usb is probably the standard, but you can also buy cases that support both, and then you can decide which is faster once you assemble everything
if you want to be able to read/write to the drive, you need to format it as FAT32 or HFS. If you want to be able to read and write on a mac and a pc, format it as FAT32.
Hope this helps
As long as it runs on it's own power supply and has a fan you'll be fine. I got a cheap Freecom external drive 18 months ago; it's been switched on almost permanently and as it houses my iTunes library it's accessed frequently.
Well I just got Logic Express Studio. Long story short this app is huge like 70gigs huge. Pretty much took up my entire HD (i have a 120). What are some good external hardrives that would be good for me? need some advice
Any 7200RPM Firewire 400 external will work. I recommend LaCie. Don't buy the USB model. They will be too slow for such large files. I think I've transferred about 70GB in 10 minutes or so to my external. I have a Western Digital My Book Pro, the 250GB version.
bryan
Mac Specs: 15 inch Macbook Pro 2 GHz Core Duo 2 GB of Ram: 20 inch iMac 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo 3 GB Ram
I personally love G-Tech drives...The have so many options in connections. HAving a macbook i think you are pretty stuck with firewire 400. I use the fw 400 and it transfers and reads extremely fast.
one more question, since I never delt with an external hard drive, to I have to export it every time I want to use logic? or is it like a plug in to firewire and it acts like the internal one?
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to it in osx. i will let you know if it works if you would like. the only problem i have with ehd's on a mac is the NTFS blunder. FAT32 can only hold files up to 4gb... no larger. this is a bit of a problem for me so thats why im doing NTFS to see if i can get it. My Book essential is great quality for a great price. how much are you getting yours by the way? i got mine last december for around 300 or so. good luck.
