External hard drive.

Hello, Can anyone recommend a good external hard drive that I can buy for my Macbook. I would like to start ripping DVD's but I don't want to use the avalible space on my hard drive. I was thinking of spending around $200.

Thanks,
Leon.

you could buy a nice hard drive for around $150 and then buy a case for $50. you would probably get more storage space that way.

Thanks for the quick reply. Where is the best place to shop?

I always use www.newegg.com

Are all external hard drives compatible with Mac, could i buy one from the Dell web site?

Yes, most (probably all) external USB or Firewire drives are compatible with Mac. I have one I got off the shelf (well, actually it was one that came with a USB enclosure that I took out the drive and put into a Firewire enclosure; more on that in a sec) sitting right here on my desk next to my Macbook. 250GB and it was about $120.

Caveat: I would strongly recommend that you get a Firewire enclosure. Why? Well, it's faster, but also aside from the limited number of USB ports you might have available so you won't be taking up one with it, I've encountered at least one problem with a USB external DVD burner. It had both USB and Firewire, and when hooked up to my Mac via USB I had problems getting it to work. When I hooked it up with Firewire it performed flawlessly. Might have been because it was my old Mac Mini, but that was my experience, so I recommend that a Firewire external enclosure be used with a Mac.

You may also want to look into putting one together yourself. You can buy a hard drive enclosure for $20-50 and put any drive you want in it (provided it's the right size for the enclosure). This will save you some money.

-Nick

I have a 320Gb Seagate external drive (Firewire & USB2).

And 2 IcyBox enclosures (one is USB2, the other is Firwire & USB2) with 400Gb Spinpoint and 320Gb hard drives.

I changed the 60Gb drive that came with my MacBook for a 160Gb drive and put the former in a small USB enclosure which needs no mains power.

What I really like about OSX is the ability to boot from an external drive (including my iPod, if I wanted to).

I just use my ipod for now.

Sorry to hijack your thread!! but im looking at an external hard drive too. Has anyone had any experience with Lacie drives? A friend of mine has one and it seems stable and well built

tangents R us

;D

seeing as we're off on this new tangent, i have a Lacie external hard drive with firewire, which worked OK on my old PC (which fortunately died giving me the excuse I needed to switch...), but now is only coming up as read-only now it's attached to my new macbook.

any ideas on how to change this 'permission', or has it been permanently tainted by it's exposure to the evil PC?

Stay away from Lacie. Their quality has gone downhill as of late.

I will echo the sentiments of others here. Buy a case and a hard drive and put them together yourself. You can get significantly more storage space than if you buy a pre-built one and you will save money in the process.

hathadave said:

;D

seeing as we're off on this new tangent, i have a Lacie external hard drive with firewire, which worked OK on my old PC (which fortunately died giving me the excuse I needed to switch...), but now is only coming up as read-only now it's attached to my new macbook.

any ideas on how to change this 'permission', or has it been permanently tainted by it's exposure to the evil PC?

Click to expand...

Odds are it was formatted as NTFS. Macs can read but not writ to NTFS discs. You need to reformat it as FAT-32 if you want to keep Windows compatibility of go to HFS+ for Mac only use.

oh no, I'm off windows for good!

will format this eve.

cheers all.

baggss said:

Stay away from Lacie. Their quality has gone downhill as of late.

Click to expand...

thanks i was going to invest in one but i'll look elswhere!

Check this one out: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000H3AW94/?tag=macforums0e4-20

I just received it today and so far it has been wonderful...the only potential problem might be the size (gb)

You can check out another thread I have posted here.

First started a couple of months ago looking at hard drives and have reviewed multiple drives there. Just made my decision and ordered today. you can check out my last post there for my recommendations based on 2 months of research. the combination I have listed there was $230 total.

I recently bought a new 15" MacBook Pro and built myself a nice external drive to go with it. I do a lot of video editing, photo editing, and large downloads, so I wanted something with a lot of volume and good speed as well. I went with the following:

Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200rpm hard drive
ICY DOCK MB559UEB-1S External Enclosure (USB2.0 and 1394b)

The end price turned out at around $280, but I ended up with a nicer setup than I could have gotten for that much money in a pre-built model. The WD drives have never given me trouble, and I've had three or four of them now. If you don't need the Firewire 800 or the big capacity, I imagine you could scale that price back to $200 very easily. The ICY DOCK enclosure has also been great - easy setup, functions perfectly, looks purdy on my desk. ;D

inertkinesis said:

I recently bought a new 15" MacBook Pro and built myself a nice external drive to go with it. I do a lot of video editing, photo editing, and large downloads, so I wanted something with a lot of volume and good speed as well. I went with the following:

Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200rpm hard drive
ICY DOCK MB559UEB-1S External Enclosure (USB2.0 and 1394b)

The end price turned out at around $280, but I ended up with a nicer setup than I could have gotten for that much money in a pre-built model. The WD drives have never given me trouble, and I've had three or four of them now. If you don't need the Firewire 800 or the big capacity, I imagine you could scale that price back to $200 very easily. The ICY DOCK enclosure has also been great - easy setup, functions perfectly, looks purdy on my desk. ;D

Click to expand...

This sounds like a good option and those Icy Dock cases look sweet! How difficult would it be to put together? Given the fact i've never done anything like this before!

on the subject of externals, anyone know how to make iphoto stop thinking my external is a digital camera? it's really annoying. thanks


wooohooo first post

Rambaud said:

I have a 320Gb Seagate external drive (Firewire & USB2).

And 2 IcyBox enclosures (one is USB2, the other is Firwire & USB2) with 400Gb Spinpoint and 320Gb hard drives.

I changed the 60Gb drive that came with my MacBook for a 160Gb drive and put the former in a small USB enclosure which needs no mains power.

What I really like about OSX is the ability to boot from an external drive (including my iPod, if I wanted to).

Click to expand...

Hold on, So its possible to install OSX on my ipod, take it to a computer at school, and boot up my OSX - my computer basically - on the school computer?

I really hope you say this is possible, cos that is so cool.