Which External Hard Drive should I buy/Do you suggest?

Good firewire 800 hard drive

I'm looking for an external hard drive that has both USB and Firewire 800 on it. I currently ave the Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition, and i am very disappointed with it, enough for me to send it back. I have only had it for a few weeks, within the first week, it went corrupt 2X, and i lost about 68GBs worth of pictures and music, some of which i didn't have backed up before purchasing this. Another thing is, the power button is worthless that is built in, it doesn't even work on my model. So after all of this nonsense, i'm looking for another. Can anyone suggest another one, that isn't a Western Digital?

I have two G-Tech G-Drive drives. I have been very pleased with them. They come is both Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 variants and also support USB 2.0. The enclosures are fanless which means that except when you are actually reading from or writing to the drive, it is essentially silent.

I happen to love my WD MyBook. BUt if you ned another company LaCie is a good one. They make the D2 Quadra which is FW400 and FW800. I have found that the G-Techs are overly expensive. Maybe Im wrong but when I looked they were almost double what I payed for my WD with the same size drive in it.

I was looking into the same thing myself and it makes no difference to me building or buying. When I priced things up I found that the best raid 0 FW800 setup was just to buy a LACIE d2 like this one, I couldn't build it any cheaper!

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=673577

This is firewire 400, firewire 800 and USB.

The enclosure contains two PATA 500Gb seagate drives (well mine does). The price for this is £189 but this does include the 2 drives which would cost you about £110 anyway so you are paying £79 for a RAID0 external enclosure with FW800!

I have been totally impressed with it. In normal use it just seems like an internal drive.

See my reply to post for similar question, it would suit you too.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92919

HD for iMac advice please...

Hi guys,

im looking to purchase an external HD for my iMac as ive just got leopard, and time machine has prompted to me to do what i should have done months ago.

Ive been looking at the Western Digital Mybook premium, as the 320gb option is only £72, and is pretty sexy looking, can anyone offer me any advice on what would be best?

thanks in advance

nik

I've been using a MyBook for quite some some now. Pretty good piece. But you can never tell with hard drives. Always keep a backup of a backup.

a backup of a backup is overkill for most people, the chances of your main drive and your backup going at the same time are stupidly small.

I use a seagate freeagent 500gb drive, not let me down so far, used only for backups of my macbook.

Yeah, but if some thief comes in, he will most like take that macbook and the hard drive along with him. So if you had say some of that data stored on CDs kept in the basement, data would be safe.

It might be overkill for most people. The number of backups you take highly depend on how much you value your data... (you can never get those family pictures back...)

need extrnal hard drive compatible with both Mac and PC? Suggestions?

Hello,
I operate both mac os 10 and PC and often switch files between. I had purchased a 100GB seagate external drive and I was able to read and write easily between the PC's and Mac's....
I now am looking for a 500 GB external drive. I purchased the Maxtor onetouch; formatted it to PC first...I was able to read the drive on my mac and download from the drive to the mac; but I cannot write to the drive from the mac.
I then tried formatting the maxtor to Mac; but the PC will not read a Mac format at all.

I have just purchased another seagate drive of 500GB thinking I will be able to use this drive like I use my 100GB sagate.
I ran into the same problem.

Can anyone help? I am worried all drives will be this way now. How come my older 100GB drive by the same manufacturer is totally compatible with both; but the newer 500GB are not?

I was also looking at the Buffalo drives. Are these any more compatible? Are there any brands which you have used which work well with both?

Maybe I need to format it a certain way?

Oh and I just noticed.....my drive that is compat with both is formatted as Fat 32 whereas the new drive is Windows NT...What is the diff? Can/should I change to Fat 32?

Thanks for your help

You can format the drive for Windows (MS-DOS) with Disk Utility.

There are plenty of posts around the forum about this.

A Mac can read NTFS partitions but not write to them.
A Win machine can neither read nor write to a Mac partition.

You will need to format any drive as FAT32 (MS-DOS as bry noted in Disk Utility) to be able to both read and write to it from your Mac and Win machine.

You can also grab NTFS for Mac or NTFS-3G. This will enable full read and write capability to an NTFS drive from your Mac. I use the Paragon software.

You can grab MediaDrive 7. This will enable your Win machine to read and write to Mac formatted drives.

Yes, there are plenty of threads that discuss this. Please use the Search function to locate them.

I only notice a hum every once and while. Maybe its there all the time and I just notice it occasionally. I never dislike the hum either, I just think "Thats my external HDD."

What extrenal portable laptop hard drive?

Hello everyone,
I am planning to buy an external portable hard drive that can be powered by my MacBooks USB. There is alot of options in the market. Any particular make/model you guys have used and recommend?

thanks

I say you should make your own. HD enclosures cost $10 and you can toss in your own HD. It should be cheaper than buying one already made.

bryphotoguy said:

I say you should make your own. HD enclosures cost $10 and you can toss in your own HD. It should be cheaper than buying one already made.

Click to expand...

I agree. I bought an external HDD last summer which is basically a 3.5" enclosure with a 500GB Western Digital HDD. It cost me $140... If you buy the enclosure and the HDD separately, then put them together yourself, you should be able to save big bucks. Mine was already built btw, but I did open it up and it is pretty simple to assemble.

lacie makes one with a nice somewhat shock proof case if you can stomach
the ugly orange color.

yeah i saw that one before. orange isnt my color.

do you have an old broken ipod?