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

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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.
 
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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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2.26 13" MBP, WD 7200 RPM 320GB HDD, 4GB RAM; 2 EDU iBook G4s, 4g nano, 16GB 2g Touch, shuffle
External HDD recommendations?

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?

Thank you!
 
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macbook external hard drive

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?
 
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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 :p
 
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I'm thinking about getting thst sameone, I think they are a good quality HD. Lacie has very good ones also.
 
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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 :D 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.
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External Hard Drive for my Macbook

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.
 
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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
 
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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.

Thanks for the reply. Good to know.
 
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macbook 2.16GHZ, 1G mem, 120HD
What external hard drive

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
 
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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
 
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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.
 
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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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I assume you can tell the app where to retrieve and save the file to so it should be no problem. I've never used the app your talking about though. Plug in the external and it mounts to the desktop like a DVD does.
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Which external hard drive for new MBP?

I just ordered a 17" MBP today, and being new to the mac world, I'm curious if there are any particular external hd's that work better with the mac platform? I've used maxtor and western digital in the past with no problems on my windows laptops. I will be using the drive mainly to back up digital images (jpg & raw) so I plan on something in the 500 gig range.

As a side note, I was told that in order to write files to my current windows formatted external hd's, they will need to be re-formatted for mac? I don't plan on doing this since I will still need to use them with my other pc's. Will I be able to at least upload files (jpg's, itunes backup file, etc.) from my current drives to my new mac?

Thanks in advance.

Chris
 
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Personally I would never buy an all-in-one external hard drive. Your best bet is to buy a hard drive enclosure and a hard drive separately. This way your hard drive is always expandable since hard drives are getting bigger and bigger these days (I think they just released a 2TB hdd..)

My external hard drive is in FAT32 format and this works with both the PC and MAC perfectly. What you want to look for is what connection you will get. My external case only has USB or eSATA (which the mac doesn't have a port for). If you want to spend a bit of money, definitely look for a Firewire 800/USB hard drive enclosure which is supported by the mac, and you can use USB on the PC if you don't have a firewire card on it.

As for the hard drive, they are all the same on PC or MAC. I like WD's, some people complain about maxtors, but they are all pretty so-so.
 
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I just ordered one a Western Digital Mybook Pro 500GB, I compared a few other drives from other maufacturers, but the Mybook Pro came out on top. It has FW 800, FW 400 & USB 2, and comes with all three cables, I'll be using FW 800 on my Macbook Pro so looking forward to the speed upgrade from USB, the price of the Mybook drives are pretty decent too.

Mybook Pro 500GB

Review of Mybook Pro 500GB




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