newb questions regarding adding a HD…can someone please translate into simple terms

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I am hoping someone here can simplify this for me. I have been reading alot of posts, but don't quite know which direction to go.

Problems:

• I need a reliable backup of all my files as I am beginning my grad quarter in design school.
• I also use a lot of disc heavy programs and would love to speed things up a bit.
• Can both be had?

Facts:

• I currently have one 500gb drive that came installed in my mac pro.
• I use Adobe CS religiously

Questions:

• Seagate is the drive I should be buying, correct?
• Who should I be buying from?
• Is this thinking correct on my part……The 500gb drive that is currently in my computer, which has OSX on it, will remain my disc that contains OSX along with all my applications. The new disk, say it's another 500gb, will be strictly for backup? Will I be able to drag files to this disk in finder?

thanks for your help

Brice
 
M

MacHeadCase

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Hi Brice0501! I don't have all the answers but here are those that I do have.

Yes you will be able to drag and drop to your backup hard drive. Seagtes are top notch and they are the only company that have their hard drives backed up with a 5 year warranty.

They might not be the cheapest around, but Other World Computing are great, I used them to buy RAM for an old grape iMac I had way back when and I do not hesitate to recommend them. They are efficient, helpful and very nice to deal with.

Here is what they have to offer in terms of internal hard drives specifically for the Mac Pro.

As for hassle free backups, why not use SuperDuper!: it was in a comparison test with three or four other backup utilities for Mac OS X Tiger and it came up on top with having the most accuracy and fewer dropped files in the resulting backup. Plus you can make the backup bootable if anything should happen to your usual hard drive.

Hope this helps a bit. :girl:
 
M

MacHeadCase

Guest
Oh and forgot to say that you need to look at the hard drive's RPM (revolution per minute) to determine its speed of read/write. The higher the RPM, the faster the hard drive is. Of course, you will pay more for those too.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
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Brice0501, you may also wish to consider G-Drives, which make a drive whose enclosure perfectly matches the style of your Mac Pro. See:

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE.cfm

I am using their external drives and they are working very well. The technology is no slouch either. You can (and should!) get the FW800 drives. The FW400, which I have, run very fast - fastest external drives I have ever benchmarked, coming in at a sustained transfer rate of 33 MB/s against the theoretical FW400 maximum of 40 MB/s. I suspect the FW800 would be faster - wish I had known about them when I bought mine.

I use mine just like you suggest - my main drive on the machine itself does all the heavy lifting, and I use the external G-Drives for backup only. I have two of the drives, and do a rotating backup. I keep one drive at the office and one drive at home. Each time I do a backup (about once a month, or more if I am generating lots of new stuff) I rotate the drives. This way, even if (god forbid) my house should be destroyed or my office should be destroyed, I still have my precious data - in this case, about 10 years of digital photos and my whole iTunes collection.

So, I would recommend considering G-Drives, getting two of them, and instituting a rotating backup. The ultimate in data security!
 

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