External HD for Mac?

MatyMoo

Bit of a technophobe, recently bought a MacBook Pro running Mac OSX 10.7.1 and need a cheapish hard drive to back it up to. I have lots of photo's and music!

Any suggestions?

wba31

I am a mac geek, and was always advised to buy western digital drives. I bought one for my wife, didnt work properly, and my bro in law has had 2 that have simply stopped working and lost all his back up data.

I have for my mac a 2TB Lacie Stark http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-Starck-Desktop-Hard-Drive/dp/B002SGATQO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317800277&sr=8-1

I dont move my macbook, it acts as a desktop, and this HD is great, just sits on my desk.

my wife is a little more portable with her mac and has a portable lacie hard drive, that i cannot find anywhere so i presume has been replaced by a new model...

NeverAgain_2

My Seagate USB drive is a few years old and works fine with my MacBook.

There was a thread on here a little while ago from someone who was having compatibility problems.

I suggest buying a drive from an Apple shop, or their website.

The drives on there are either Apple-branded or 'designed for your Mac', and are not much more expensive than elsewhere.

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/storage?mco=MjMwMzAyMDk

macman

The hard drives in a Mac are physically no different to those in a PC, the only difference is that the Mac OS uses a different formatting system. Any SATA drive can be used and formatted for a Mac.
Mac OSX uses Extended (Journaled) file format, Windows uses NTFS.

wba31

NeverAgain wrote: »

My Seagate USB drive is a few years old and works fine with my MacBook.

There was a thread on here a little while ago from someone who was having compatibility problems.

I suggest buying a drive from an Apple shop, or their website.

The drives on there are either Apple-branded or 'designed for your Mac', and are not much more expensive than elsewhere.

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/storage?mco=MjMwMzAyMDk

I bought my hard drive off amazon as at the time is was about £50 cheaper than in the apple store. When plugged in it asked how i wanted to format it and worked from there...

InsideInsurance

For small storage and portable duties I have a Iomega USB external drive which works fine. Had a Western Digital NAS but always had problems with it.

For big storage I use a Drobo which connects up to the mac using Firewire which is much quicker than USB 2.0 for large data transfers and as a RAID system it also effectively backs itself up so if one of the drives in it (it holds up to four standard internal hard drives) dies you don't lose any of your data. Currently have 4 tb of movies, photos and music on it and yet to have a problem.

Elle7

Oooh, I've been looking for one of these.

Quick question - I have a Macbook Air which I use as a laptop (at work, out and about, etc) and a Windows PC which I use at home. Is it possible to get something to allow me to transfer files between both? It drives me mad having to email them all etc.

Thanks

redcard

Elle7 wrote: »

Oooh, I've been looking for one of these.

Quick question - I have a Macbook Air which I use as a laptop (at work, out and about, etc) and a Windows PC which I use at home. Is it possible to get something to allow me to transfer files between both? It drives me mad having to email them all etc.

Thanks

Check out Dropbox

paddyrg

Whichever drive you buy (and frankly why pay Apple massively over the going rate just for Apple branding on identical hardware?), think how you need to use it - do you need to -

1) Share files with Windows and Linux PC's using the drive
or
2) store any individual files larger than 4GB (eg huge video files)?

If 1) format the drive as FAT32
if 2) format the drive as HFS+ (aka "Apple OSX advanced file system", or something like that)

Alas 1) and 2) are incompatible. Stupid in this day and age. It is ALL about licensing and politics, could be solved in a heartbeat, but it is the customer that suffers.

Chartered_Eng

Elle7 wrote: »

Oooh, I've been looking for one of these.

Quick question - I have a Macbook Air which I use as a laptop (at work, out and about, etc) and a Windows PC which I use at home. Is it possible to get something to allow me to transfer files between both? It drives me mad having to email them all etc.

Thanks

A simple way is to get a thumb drive. They are cheap, come formatted for PC's and can be read/written by a Mac.

You can network them together via EtherNet but I have not tried it.

Chartered_Eng

MatyMoo wrote: »

Bit of a technophobe, recently bought a MacBook Pro running Mac OSX 10.7.1 and need a cheapish hard drive to back it up to. I have lots of photo's and music!

Any suggestions?

Not mentioned by others is the two fundamental different types of hard disk connection methods supported by your MacBook Pro. These are USB and FireWire and there are important differences:

USB 1.0 - Rare these days but VERY slow - avoid at all costs
USB 2.0 - Fast and commonly available
USB3.0 - New, fast and not supported by the Mac hence a waste of money to buy one.
Firewire 400 - The original Apple connection and fast
Firewire 800 - Fastest - twice as fast as USB 2.0

Some external drives come with USB and Firewire so you can pick and choose but these cost more. Firewire 800 is best but for your use maybe a bit OTT.

Things to consider: If using TimeMachine to do your backups then the external drive must be reformatted for the Mac (HFS+) as most hard drives are sold formatted for the PC. This reformatting is easy to do.

The initial back up may take a long time depending upon how much space is used on the MacBook (could be hours). This is where the Firewire 800 comes into it's own. The USB 2 drive will work, it will just take a bit longer. If you have time then that's ok