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

Avoid Belkin.
I bought one and it just argued and argued.
Took it back and got a Fujitsu Siemans and it's great.

I have a WD Passport. It's really good for those on the go. It's small, powered by USB, and has a decent storage to price ratio.

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...

This is what I did when I upgraded my macbook's 60Gb drive to 160Gb a few months ago.

If you are not in a rush wait for one to go on sale. Every week bestbuy or a similar store has a certain brand on sale. When the sales are good the cost of a prebuilt can be less than building one yourself.

I personally recommend western digital passport.

thanks guys, I went with the WD passport.
small in size and complements the looks of the MacBook.

cheers

External Storage

I have been looking at options for external storage for a while. Being new to Mac, I wasn't aware of Ministack v3. Does anyone have input on these? After reading reviews on WD, iOmega, ect and seeing how many of those reviews conflict, the whole process of finding something that will work well, silently and for an acceptable amount of time looks like it may be an effort of futility.

Thoughts, ideas, experiences on drives with firewire or wireless is welcome.

Personally went with this case. It is a little on the high side, but does have quad connections, USB, FW 400 & 800 along with eSATA, so you're pretty well future proofed. Has about the best currently available chipset. Is silent in operation (at least as silent as the drive you decide to use in it.
Put the Seagate 750GB in it at the time. Have at least two others I know that have opted for the same case, and we're all experiencing flawless operation thus far.

You can also check out a portion of my research while looking for an external in this thread. It's almost a year old now, but still fairly accurate.

Have just about decided I will get one of the Time Capsule drives when they hit, so ya'll can watch for a review on that.

External Drive for MacBook

Hey guys. I was thinking about buying a 1TB MyBook external harddrive. I already own a 1TB external drive but it doesn't sleep the disks or do anything special that and it gets pretty loud when I have it on to listen to music and stuff like that.

My question is would I be able to guy a MyBook and leave it on and plugged in forever and will it only turn on when it needs to access the discs (Time Machine, playing iTunes, etc.)

Is it quiet even when listening to music for a few hours and it is accessing the disc (I have my music on an external drive)

Will it go to sleep pretty fast once it I am done using it?




And last but not least, any suggestions of what else I should get or bad/good experiences with a MyBook. Any rumors of a new MyBook coming out soon or something else I should wait on?



Here is the HDD I was thinking about: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=357 ~ Is this a good one?

I'm using the Mybook Premium 500GB. I wouldn't say it is quiet, but then again, I haven't found a quiet external drive. It also goes to sleep whenever.

However, what puzzles me is why your current external isn't going to sleep. Did you check the "Sleep hard drives" option in your power options?

It isn't sleeping because it is this harddrive. It just has a switch and thats it

http://www.iomega.com/direct/produc...&ASSORTMENT<>ast_id=63191&bmUID=1202673975643

I have an external drive that only shuts off after about 5-10 min of not using it only when pluged in through fire-wire. If it is plugged in through USB it will not shut itself off.

I have a SeaGate Free Agent, it's silent.

It's just an overall great drive, IMO.

I have a full sized WD 250GB (I think...yeah, pretty sure) in a firewire enclosure (it came with a USB enclosure, I prefer firewire though my laptop sized USB SATA enclosure work well enough) and it is silent.

I have a couple of other full-sized lower capacity drives that scream when they're on, however. That's why they're sitting on a shelf while this drive acts as Time Machine target.

External Needs...

Im in the market to purchase a storage device. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have thousands of images i want to get off my MBP.

Thank ye kindly

were you looking for something portable or something that will stay on a desk. for portable i like the seagate freeagent pro(i believe) i have the 160 gig version. For my stationary drive i have a WD mybook 1 terabyte which i love. both were reasonably priced i know i payed 229 for the WD and somewhere are around 150(maybe more maybe less) for the seagate. Hope this helps

WD mybook 250 gb here and I love it. I have it plugged in through Firewire 800 and it is very very fast. I use it for time machine and all of my backup/redering/scratch disks in Final Cut and works great.

iMac External Drive Suggestions?

I tried doing a search and could not find anything really definitive so pardon me for asking... but I'd like to explore some options with regard to buying/using an external HDD with my soon to be delivered iMac.

I vaguely recall someone suggesting buying a netgear network drive setup, and I have seen a few of these types at different stores where you buy a "carrier" and then mount one or two HDDs inside the housing.

Although my iMac has the 500GB HDD, I can easily see where I might want to use Time Machine so that takes at least 500GB, then I have tons of images so I can probably see 200GB of images. It looks like I would use at least a TB system, but maybe I should be looking at expansion? Anyone here using the iOmega 1TB stackable drive?

Well, tell me about your fav setup be it a network drive or simply a USB/FW external. Thanks in advance!

I bought one of those 250gig WD Mybooks and extracted the drive to put in the Firewire enclosures I bought for another drive that was noisy in addition to being of way less capacity. Works very nice. I was a little leery of using USB which is why Firewire is my choice, but it turns out that the USB enclosure I got for my old internal notebook 2.5" drive that came with my Macbook works well enough.

Now sporting a 160GB internal, and have a 250GB firewire, with 80GB USB. Nice! Time machine made it short work to fill the big drive though, so I'm riding at 1GB free on it.

If you want the best, I'd recommend G-Tech.

Sorry,I don't know anything about the Netgear drives. I have a Simple Share NAS drive, hardwired to my router that I use for backup. I haven't tested it with Time Machine. Most of my files are either saved directly to my NAS or I copy them manually as needed... My Simple Share drive is 500 gigs and a tad slow, but it does what I need it to do and its reliable so I really don't sweat it.