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

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i use the mybook series too. i have 3 now... a 350GB, 500GB, and a brand new 1TB. They're pretty solid. My 500GB one is a "World Edition" so it's hooked up to my ethernet for everyone in the house...

Unfortunately, the stupid remote access program doesnt work on a mac :(

But other than that, I've always sworn by WD. Anytime I used see a Maxtor drive in my computer, I used to rip it out. But since Seagate acquired Maxtor, they seem to have gotten better.
 
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thanks for your input everyone. After some additional research I decided to go with the G-Drive Quad (320 gb), which has gotten really high reviews from sources I trust. LaCie was a second choice.
 
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External Hard-Drive question

Hi,

I've searched the forums for recommendations for external hard drives and I think I'm gonna go for a Western Digital Elements either 400gb or 500gb.

What I would like to know though is if I really need to have a HD with firewire connection. The WD hard drives that I have seen are usb connections and they are in my budget... (less that £100) I will be using the HD mainly for storage but now and again I would like to view/open some of the documents/movies/music/other various files that I have on it.
If I have a USB connected HD would I be able to open the files directly or would I need to copy what I needed to the Mac and then open it from there?

Thanks a lot!

Jamie
 
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Firewire will make it a lot faster, but I guess USB 2.0 can't be that bad.

As always, I recommend to you the Disk Maxi (outdated link removed). It is £95 and it is so tiny for 500GB!
 
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but when you say "faster", is that just to litterally transfer the files to the HD, or also viewing them...?
 
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Firewire is faster than USB 2.0. Everything that travels along that wire does it faster. Moving and viewing both move the same amount of data, so both are faster.
 
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hmm yeah i guess that was a stupid question...

in your experience, have you been able to watch a movie file directly from the hard drive using USB2? watching a movie file would probably be the most consuming task I would do.

thanks a lot for your help!
 
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Well, I have my entire movie collection in an external HDD(USB supported) and never had a problem viewing.
 
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La Cie External Hard Drive

My external hard drive recently stopped working, it makes a clicking sound. I took it to a technician who had a look at it, but he was unable to get anything off it.

Is it possible to open the unit and tranfer the disk into another unit ( which is known to work) and try to access the information from that when hooked up to the computer?
 
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Yes it is. The drive is easily enough opened up. Just be sure you don't yank anything too hard and break with internal wires. As far as reading data off the drive, you may or may not need recovery software depending on what's wrong with it. The drive however, doesn't really care what enclosure it's in, or whether it's in an enclosure at all. Newertech makes a handy $30 universal USB adapter that will plug into any drive and then hook it to your Mac via USB. It's great for just this type of situation.
-Dave
 
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usb adapter fro Hard Drive

Thanks for the information, the hard drive has opened up easily enough and it doesn't look scratched or damaged in any way. It would be good to try the usb connector, do you have a link that I could go to to find out more about the device that you mentioned.
 
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External Hard Drive Recommendations

We recently purchase an IMAC for use by the family. It has a hard drive with approximately 240GB.

Now that we have everything on this unit, we want to make sure we have a backup in case something happens to it.

Can someone recommend a brand and size of external hard drive that we could use to backup the machine? I see different types of drives advertised, but I was not sure if they would be compatible with a MAC and the clerks at the stores have not been much help.

Thanks.
 
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You can pretty much buy and USB2 or Firewire capable drive and it will work. The software that comes with these drives is not Mac compatible, but you don't need it anyhow.

You can save yourself some money and buy an inexpensive case and then a hard drive and put the two together. This is the best way to get more Drive for your $$$.

By the way, it's iMac and Mac, not IMAC and MAC.....
 
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I have a Seagate FreeAgent, and I love it. For whatever size you want, it may cost a little more than the competition, but the thing's got a 5 year warranty on it. I was debating between a WD MyBook or some other different makes/models, and then I saw the FreeAgent. The warranty on it was the dealmaker. They have no fans, and are really quiet. I give it 5 stars.
 
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I have a 250 and 500 GB MyBook drives and so far they're great. The most recent one was the 500GB one I bought from www.Newegg.com. When I priced their cheapest USB enclosure and cheapest 500GB hard drive on their site (which was also a WD drive) it was the same price at the MyBook.

As long as you go with one of the top name brands you should be fine no matter how you go about getting your drive.
 
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I was always told to have twice the backup space as I had on my box. Thus, you might consider a 500GB backup drive for your 240GB system.
-Dave
 
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I m not techie so I hope you don't find this question silly - What do I need to do to set up an external HD for backing up my files? I am looking into an external HD that I can connect to firewire. Many thanks.
 
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I have the same set-up: a LaCie 500GBs FireWire and use SuperDuper! (just google up the name as is - it does indeed have an ! at the end) and it does all the work for you. It makes the external bootable so if anything happens with the internal hard drive the other one can boot your Mac.

Buying the licence will let you be able to schedule your backups, and give you more options for different types of backups.

SuperDuper! is the best backup application, according to this article/comparison tests (dead link removed).
 

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This will be a useful information if it is possible.

BTW, I m not techie so I hope you don't find this question silly - What do I need to do to set up an external HD for backing up my files? I am looking into an external HD that I can connect to firewire. Many thanks.

I also am doing exactly that. When you get your external drive - just connect it, open up Disc Utility - then partition and format the new drive.

I use one partition for a bootable backup with Superduper and the other for keeping all myiTunes and video stored.
 
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