Deployment Ready

shocknocka · Jan 13, 2016

Hi all,
First post here. Not familiar with the territory or much lingo so I'm going to dive right in with my question.
My wife is leaving for deployment with the navy to a small island with little to no internet service. She will spend a year on this tiny island. I'd like to get her set up with plenty of movies and television to keep herself entertained. I have the data on a my personal windows computer. I'd like to buy here about 4 terabytes worth of hard drive and load them up from my PC so that she can seamlessly watch them on her macbook air. I don't really know where to begin. I don't have a good idea of what hard drive to buy or how/when to format what, lol.

any suggestions, links, advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

pigoo3 · Jan 13, 2016

shocknocka said:
I don't have a good idea of what hard drive to buy or how/when to format what, lol.

There are only about 4-5 hard drive manufacturers in the world:

- Western Digital
- Seagate
- Toshiba
- Samsung
- HGST (owned by Western Digital)

And folks/stores selling external HD's simply install that HD into their external case. So there really is not as many choices as you may think. The inside is the important part (the hard drive)…the outside is more or less "eye-candy".

I'm mostly talking about USB style external HD's. There are also firewire & Thunderbolt HD's available that have higher data transfer rates. BUt these get more expensive.

Go to a good Mac-focused site like OWC (macsales.com)…and browse what they have. You could check out a site like newegg.com as well.

Here's an example of something that might meet your needs (it has a Toshiba drive inside):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3UH7T4.0/

Also here's an article to read on external HD's:

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/storage/external-hard-drive-1292181

HTH,

- Nick

shocknocka · Jan 13, 2016

pigoo3 said:
There are only about 4-5 hard drive manufacturers in the world:

- Western Digital
- Seagate
- Toshiba
- Samsung
- HGST (owned by Western Digital)

And folks/stores selling external HD's simply install that HD into their external case. So there really is not as many choices as you may think. The inside is the important part (the hard drive)…the outside is more or less "eye-candy".

I'm mostly talking about USB style external HD's. There are also firewire & Thunderbolt HD's available that have higher data transfer rates. BUt these get more expensive.

Go to a good Mac-focused site like OWC (macsales.com)…and browse what they have. You could check out a site like newegg.com as well.

Here's an example of something that might meet your needs (it has a Toshiba drive inside):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3UH7T4.0/

Also here's an article to read on external HD's:

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/storage/external-hard-drive-1292181

HTH,

- Nick

thank you Nick. Any guidance on the process of transferring data from pc and a making that data compatible with the macbook. Im sure its a matter of dragging and dropping from the PC to the HD, but i've heard there is some formatting that is require in order to play the movies on the mac.

MacInWin · Jan 13, 2016

Without knowing what Macbook Air she has, get a drive that fits the interface on her machine best. I second Nick's suggestion of OWC, they are Mac-savvy. I prefer WD drives myself, I've had "adventures" with Seagates and Samsungs have been reported to not work well with Macs, too. Depending on what her machine has for interfaces, I would suggest a drive with it's own power rather that one that draws power from the USB port. But if weight is an issue for her to carry, then a good portable drive that uses USB power should be ok, so don't let my preference scare you away from that option. Once you get the drive, you can format it on her MBA to OS X extended (journaled) as that is the default for OS X. That way she won't have any issues with reading or writing to that drive. To move the videos from your PC you can either use your home network or dump them to something like Dropbox and pull them down to her system (much slower way, that dropbox. Much better if you can get the two machines to see each other in the network.) Moving that much data will take a while, so plan on letting it run, and run, and run. You didn't mention what format the videos are in but the best thing to do is move one, then test that it runs well on her system before you spend hours moving it all only to find it won't work. If it's in a format Mac uses, find, if not VLC will play almost everything out there pretty well.

And thank her for her service. Isolated tours are never fun, and if the island she's going to is the one I know about, the weather is dead boring...warm and sunny all the time, except when it rains.

Been there, done that.

shocknocka · Jan 13, 2016

MacInWin said:
Without knowing what Macbook Air she has, get a drive that fits the interface on her machine best. I second Nick's suggestion of OWC, they are Mac-savvy. I prefer WD drives myself, I've had "adventures" with Seagates and Samsungs have been reported to not work well with Macs, too. Depending on what her machine has for interfaces, I would suggest a drive with it's own power rather that one that draws power from the USB port. But if weight is an issue for her to carry, then a good portable drive that uses USB power should be ok, so don't let my preference scare you away from that option. Once you get the drive, you can format it on her MBA to OS X extended (journaled) as that is the default for OS X. That way she won't have any issues with reading or writing to that drive. To move the videos from your PC you can either use your home network or dump them to something like Dropbox and pull them down to her system (much slower way, that dropbox. Much better if you can get the two machines to see each other in the network.) Moving that much data will take a while, so plan on letting it run, and run, and run. You didn't mention what format the videos are in but the best thing to do is move one, then test that it runs well on her system before you spend hours moving it all only to find it won't work. If it's in a format Mac uses, find, if not VLC will play almost everything out there pretty well.

And thank her for her service. Isolated tours are never fun, and if the island she's going to is the one I know about, the weather is dead boring...warm and sunny all the time, except when it rains. Been there, done that.

MacinWin, thank you.
Its probably the same island. Middle of the indian ocean and completely isolated. I appreciate the kind words.
After doing some research, I think Im going to go with the thunderbolt optionfor the speed. The macbook air she has is the 11 inch with the 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processor. The model identifier is MacBookAir6,1.

Algus · Jan 13, 2016

You can use Handbrake to rip DRM free video from any DVD in your possession. Playback works fine in iTunes but I also keep VLC installed.

You can set iTunes to use an external hard drive for its library so if you're using iTunes for all 4 TB of that media it will all be located together. iTunes does get grumpy if you try to use it without said drive attached though (which makes VLC a nice backup).

I would use a miniStack. It isn't to large, has a range of storage options, and uses USB 3 which is pretty fast. It'll be almost as good as internal storage. There's also the miniStack Max which includes a BD drive if she'll be shipping out with any physical media.

There's a whole range of options but since you need so much space, the best performance/$ ratio is probably going to be a 4 TB 7200 RPM drive. Not as good as SSD but still pretty fast and since it's just media you are loading the speed hit is not so bad.

shocknocka · Jan 14, 2016

I didnt know that about Itunes. Thanks Algus. I will install VLC for her before she leaves as a back up.

Does anyone have an opinion of the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive. They have a pretty slick looking 4 terabyte option. Heres a link.
http://www.lacie.com/products/mobile-storage/porsche-design-mobile-drive/

Slydude · Jan 14, 2016

I have had several LaCie drives over the years. The first few were quite good and I still have two of them though I haven't used those in a while. I was very disappointed with the LaCie NAS drive that I purchased about a year and a half ago. It died in a very short time.

The first LaCie drive I had started acting up and they replaced it with no complaint.That was some time ago. Some of their policies have changed. The NAS I purchased, for example, had what was I believe is a three year warranty. Did not find out till after I purchased it that the three year warranty was only good if you registered the product within the first 90 days IIRC.

chscag · Jan 14, 2016

Did not find out till after I purchased it that the three year warranty was only good if you registered the product within the first 90 days IIRC.

If that's the case, I believe you were fleeced. A warranty does not have to be registered in order to be in effect. Your purchase receipt was all you needed for that 3 year warranty to be honored. The practice of registering a warranty died many years ago. I don't know how LaCie got away with that but it doesn't surprise me. I would never buy one of their products.

MacInWin · Jan 14, 2016

Yep, that's the place. When I was there in the '80's it was pretty primitive. I just had to be there for one day off the carrier for something, so I didn't really deploy there. We were at sea for two extended 60+ days in that ocean that same cruise, so just seeing dirt was a joy at that point! It's funny how your perspective changes! The TB option will be very fast for her, VLC doesn't need to have the videos in iTunes to work, but if you want the option for both ways, go ahead and put the videos in iTunes and they will still be able to run in VLC if that's her choice. A good option would be a good set of earphones/earbuds. Noise cancelling would be best, but they get pricy pretty quickly. And depending on her berthing situation, a locking cable might not be a bad idea. I think the MBA has a locking slot. And if you plan to send her DVD's to refresh her library, a DVD reader would be a good thing, too, along with installing Handbrake so she can rip the DVD to her drive and have it available without having to use the drive. Or you can rip them to a USB memory stick and she can read them into her system from that. Lots of options we didn't have when I was in--snail mail only back then.

Slydude · Jan 15, 2016

chscag said:
If that's the case, I believe you were fleeced. A warranty does not have to be registered in order to be in effect. Your purchase receipt was all you needed for that 3 year warranty to be honored. The practice of registering a warranty died many years ago. I don't know how LaCie got away with that but it doesn't surprise me. I would never buy one of their products.

TBH I really didn't even bother calling the support people. Just spending time on their site looking to see what might have been the problem convinced me that I did not want to spend any amount of time on the phone with them at all.

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