Which External Hard Drive ?

Hello all,

My wife and I have a new Intel 24" Imac and absolutely love it! We are wanting to get an external hard drive to put all of our new daughters pictures and videos on as to not hog up the internal space.What brand and size do you all recommend?I am looking to spend under $500 and want to get as much as we can for our money.

Thanks in advance,

~74IL

wow 500 dollars is a lot for an external hard drive. are you looking for a nas system or just an external hard drive? is there a size you are looking for?

some of the bigger external hard drives can go up to 2tb.

i would recommend looking at something with fire wire as it produces faster transfer speeds the usb.

take a look around newegg to see what appeals to you

I just bought a My Book Studio Western Digital 500GB Hard drive for backups, my internal hdd is only 320GB. The 500GB supports USB 2.0, Fiirewire 400 and 800. I use Firewire 800 and it is faster, it took 30mins to do first backup of 20GB lol

I recently did a thread here on what harddrive to get, which you might like to read over.

KiwiJenn said:

I recently did a thread here on what harddrive to get, which you might like to read over.

Click to expand...

do you have a link to the thread you wrote?

Check out this long thread on externals: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80876&highlight=external+hard+drive

I'd check out the newer posts near the end...

Noel

Noels said:

Check out this long thread on externals: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80876&highlight=external+hard+drive

Noel

Click to expand...

very nice. thank you for the link

I just bought a Seagate 500 Gig Free Agent at Office Depot for $89.99 It isn't Firewire, only USB 2.0. but it looks like a pretty good HD so far.Backup of 43 Gig took about an hour.

Thanks for the link to that thread,I did not see it when I searched EHD.Yea I know $500 is alot of money,but the memories are priceless and dont want to take any chances.I will look at all of the ones mentioned and see what fits in my budget and is the best value,and heck if I can get away with an affordable choice,then so be it!

Another advantage of firewire drives is that you can daisy chain them (I.E. you can connect X amount of drives to each other and just use the one firewire port on your Mac). As far as I am aware no USB drives are capable of this.

Here is the link http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=108910

totalpardo said:

do you have a link to the thread you wrote?

Click to expand...

You can get 2TB of storage with $500...
Take a look at this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136146

NPuter said:

You can get 2TB of storage with $500...
Take a look at this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136146

Click to expand...

Thanks, I spent a good 2 hours and a pot of coffee this AM and like the following one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136100

It seems like a good value for a rediculous amount of storage, thanks again all.

1TB is A LOT for pictures and some videos.
I would recommend 2 * 500. One connected to your computer and one to backup your stuff once in a while.

Or 2 x 1TB but at least a backup drive!

I have a 320Gig hard drive in my iMac. I use a Western Digital 500Gig My Book for backups. Works pretty seamless with my system.

If you want to spend a reasonable amount of money and really feel the pics are priceless then you should be looking at a raid type setup. Perhaps something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107002

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204071

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091

If your looking for just an external drive I just bought this case (and like it a lot) :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817347015
and a 750gb western digital HD which I use for time machine.