USB External Hard Drive 1tb

prowla

espresso wrote: »

shouldn't you be buying a NAS drive? e.g. here and not a USB drive.

But a NAS drive is slower than USB.

Leopard wrote: »

Apple uses file protocols that cause problems with NAS devices.

I think that is incorrect - can you give a forinstance?

kwikbreaks

prowla wrote: »

But a NAS drive is slower than USB.

As it seems that the USB drive plugs into the router then both would be limited to whatever speed the network can run at. A gigabit network can exceed the 480Mbps speed offered by USB2 (not that either will ever achieve their respective theoretical maximum speeds).

456789

geekgirl wrote: »

Yes I am using a mac and an Apple Airport Extreme.

I like the sound of the WD powering down, I presume it would just power up again automatically once time machine 'did it's thing'.

Thanks for all of your replies.

Yes that is the case

also I have noticed on the dabs.com website that some of the mac formatted ones are cheaper than the pc ones

prowla

kwikbreaks wrote: »

As it seems that the USB drive plugs into the router then both would be limited to whatever speed the network can run at. A gigabit network can exceed the 480Mbps speed offered by USB2 (not that either will ever achieve their respective theoretical maximum speeds).

Yes, so it effectively means that the NAS is not the required solution.

On your comments about speed, I would not be so sure sure that a gb LAN would out-perform a direct connected USB2 device; the bitrate of the transmission medium is not the only relevant factor.

I have locally connected USB drives and a NAS (just a WD Booky thingy - nothing great) on a switched gigabit LAN, and the NAS is way slower.

prowla

456789 wrote: »

also I have noticed on the dabs.com website that some of the mac formatted ones are cheaper than the pc ones

If they are physically the same, then either could be reformatted to the other anyway, so the supplied format is only there to get you up and running "out of the box".

m_13

My first Western Digital My Book Pro failed after 18 months. The replacement has failed at just over 12 months old but the warranty that was on it was transferred from the old device so I only got 6 months.

I've run it over USB and Firewire but both failed to power it down on several occasions.

My dad has one that has had no problems with data but sometime does fail to shut down with the PC.

Leopard

prowla wrote: »

Leopard wrote: »

Apple uses file protocols that cause problems with NAS devices.

I think that is incorrect - can you give a forinstance?

Macs, natively, use a disc format called "HFS+ (Journaled)" and a file protocol called AFP.

Can you give a "forinstance" (sic) of a non-Apple NAS that recognises those?

A Mac can also read - but not write to - a disc formatted in NTFS.

In addition, a Mac can both read and write to a disc formatted in FAT32 but is then restricted to file sizes of 4 GB. And a Time Machine sparsebundle storage file will, typically, be well over 100 GB in size.

So how is a non-Apple NAS going to be able to store that?

Macs and non-Apple NAS devices have too many differences in disc format and file protocol requirements to work together without problems. That's why, with a Mac, it's best to use a simple hard drive formatted in "HFS+ (Journaled)". The OP can just plug such a drive into the USB2 port of her Apple Airport Extreme wireless router and then her Time Machine backups will be made automatically - even wirelessly at 5 GHz by 802.11n, if she so wishes.

That, I am sure, is what she realised from the outset - even if those with no Mac experience but with kind intentions did not.

When all's said and done, you get faster Time Machine backups via Firewire 800 or by Gigabit Ethernet to another Mac that's being used, perhaps in semi-retirement, as a server.

But USB2, although somewhat slow, is fine for Time Machine backing-up.

Making a Time Machine backup once every hour is not very demanding of a hard drive and is unlikely to cause overheating. The drive (like all hard drives) will, nonetheless, fail mechanically at some future date, so it's wise to make additional back-ups of anything that's important. For those, I, personally, use a twin drive in RAID-1 configuration (via Firewire 800), just to be on the safe side.