Lacie or Maxtor? 160GB or 250GB?

Joined
Jun 1, 2004
Messages
93
Reaction score
2
Points
8
Location
United Kingdom
Your Mac's Specs
Powerbook G4 1.67GHz 15.2" Superdrive 1.5GB RAM
Hi all,
Have filled up Powerbook internal harddisk (it seemed a lot before my whole life was organised on it) :)

Want to get an external drive, preferably one with firewire and usb2.

Suggestions/comments welcome!

Also, can someone tell me if I can store a seperate itunes library on the external drive and play the tunes without itunes copying it to the internal drive?

Many thanks!
 
Joined
May 27, 2005
Messages
975
Reaction score
61
Points
28
Location
Oklahoma City, OK
Your Mac's Specs
17" MacBook Pro, 8GB iPhone
I have the lacie 250 gig and i like it a lot, I dont know about the maxtor, but i hear they are good.
 
Joined
Oct 10, 2004
Messages
10,345
Reaction score
597
Points
113
Location
Margaritaville
Your Mac's Specs
3.4 Ghz i7 MacBook Pro (2015), iPad Pro (2014), iPhone Xs Max. Apple TV 4K
Yes, make sure you go into iTunes prefs and tell it not to copy the files when adding to the Library.

Why buy a drive when you can build one? Look for a good sale on a big IDE, ATA or SATA HDD and buy and external FW/USB 2 case and put it together.
 
Joined
Dec 18, 2004
Messages
542
Reaction score
5
Points
18
I have the 160gb LaCie Porsche Firewire drive, and it's excellent! i just ordered a 250gb one from MacMall and should arrive in a few days.
 
Joined
Jan 16, 2006
Messages
45
Reaction score
1
Points
8
i just bought a usb 2.0 segate 160 gb from bestbuy for 89 dollars and i love it alot pretty quick i thought externals would be laggy but it works great....
djlee12 said:
I have the 160gb LaCie Porsche Firewire drive, and it's excellent! i just ordered a 250gb one from MacMall and should arrive in a few days.
 
Joined
Jul 4, 2005
Messages
204
Reaction score
2
Points
18
Location
Baltimore, MD (USA)
Your Mac's Specs
Powermac Dual G4 1.25 Ghz
I would stay away from Maxtor drives. They tend to burn up within a year or two, and many of them only carry a one-year warranty.

Personally, I would reccomend buying your own enclosure and hard drive separately. You can save money that way, and you can replace the drive or upgrade it easily.

My favorite hard drives are seagates. Most of them have five year warranties, and they are relatively quiet.

In order to find a good external enclosure, you may want to check out newegg.com.
 
Joined
Oct 10, 2004
Messages
10,345
Reaction score
597
Points
113
Location
Margaritaville
Your Mac's Specs
3.4 Ghz i7 MacBook Pro (2015), iPad Pro (2014), iPhone Xs Max. Apple TV 4K
I think Drives brands are subjective. I've not had a Maxtor HDD fail on me in several years and I am currently running 10 of them. Then again, I either have them all internal or in self built enclosures, so I can't say much about the Maxtor pre-packaged external drives.
 
Joined
Jan 16, 2006
Messages
45
Reaction score
1
Points
8
i had a 100gb internal harddrive in a pc that i build for my final project at heald and it lasted me about four years. I just currently took a dive and that is the reason i switched over to my new imac. I don't know if it makes a difference but i was also used my computer in ways that subjected my harddrive to constant access reading and writing. But my new segate external is pretty nice.


baggss said:
I think Drives brands are subjective. I've not had a Maxtor HDD fail on me in several years and I am currently running 10 of them. Then again, I either have them all internal or in self built enclosures, so I can't say much about the Maxtor pre-packaged external drives.
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2006
Messages
1,868
Reaction score
106
Points
63
Your Mac's Specs
G4 Cube
timswim78 said:
I would stay away from Maxtor drives. They tend to burn up within a year or two, and many of them only carry a one-year warranty.

Personally, I would reccomend buying your own enclosure and hard drive separately. You can save money that way, and you can replace the drive or upgrade it easily.

My favorite hard drives are seagates. Most of them have five year warranties, and they are relatively quiet.

In order to find a good external enclosure, you may want to check out newegg.com.

I don't like Maxtor drives because of the noise. LaCie makes excellent hard drives, and if you can afford one, I'd say go for it. They are also generally quiet. I recently built my own external drive system using a 3.5" AMS Venus Firewire enclosure and a 250gb 7200rpm 8mb Seagate 7200.8 hard drive (I'm a big fan of Seagates...low noise, good performance, and 5-year warranty). Total cost was about $155. It works great, although the Venus case is somewhat loud because it has a cooling fan in it. Well, loud compared to my G4 Cube, which is dead silent. Links are below.

AMS Venus case, $54:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145657

250gb Seagate 7200.8 hard drive, $101:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148062


Also, if you ever decide to upgrade your internal drive, I highly recommend the free Carbon Copy Cloner, available here:

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

It lets you clone your internal drive to an external drive via Firewire. You can get a nice 2.5" Firewire enclosure for $35 here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817146604

I used my 3.5" Venus to clone my 20gb stock drive to a newer 120gb Seagate and it worked perfectly, no complaints here. Easy way to boost the internal speed and size :)
 
Joined
Jan 29, 2005
Messages
790
Reaction score
13
Points
18
Location
Legoland
I've had a maxtor 250gd drive for the last few years and have never had a problem with it. The reason why i went with the maxtor was that I'd read a lot of bad customer reviews about Lacie at the time !! But not today I see.

The maxtor HD does have a fan in it but it doesn't make too much noise and the one I've got looks cool. :p

I was also interested in the western digital drives at the time - Maybe another one to consider. :dive:
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2006
Messages
1,868
Reaction score
106
Points
63
Your Mac's Specs
G4 Cube
Mr Bobbins said:
I've had a maxtor 250gd drive for the last few years and have never had a problem with it. The reason why i went with the maxtor was that I'd read a lot of bad customer reviews about Lacie at the time !! But not today I see.

The maxtor HD does have a fan in it but it doesn't make too much noise and the one I've got looks cool. :p

I was also interested in the western digital drives at the time - Maybe another one to consider. :dive:

I think it just depends on the year you get your drive. I've heard a few people say today's Maxtor's are good. I had good reliability with all of my 40-gig Maxtors, but the noise was incredible. Now they're supposed to be fairly decent.

It would be interesting to try out an SATA enclosure. AMS makes a Venus model that supports SATA drives, although it's only USB 2.0 (no Firewire):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145660

Anyone care to pick up one of those and a WD Raptor and tell us how it goes? :D
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top