External for time machine.. Size query..

I believe you will have to partition the drive to allow TimeMachine to work and allow storage on the same physical drive. If you do not partition the drive, TimeMachine will 'use' all available storage space on the drive.

TimeMachine will only backup locally stored data. Anything that's on an external, mounted, or networked drive won't be backup.


I've always bought the drive and external enclosure separately so I know exactly what drive I have inside there. Drives failures are pretty much all luck now. Either you get a dud, or you don't and it lasts 10+ years. Just buy one that matches your storage needs (3TB) and has the longest warranty you can afford. Get a USB 3.0 enclosure since the new iMac's supports it and the drive speed won't matter much for a backup drive.

MightyWhite said:

Thanks for your reply.

So just an internal drive and pop it in an enclosure? Is it that easy?

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Pretty much! Don't buy into the whole 'Mac ready' marketing. Any drive is compatible with Mac's, you just have to format it in Disk Utilities before you can use it.

Lacie drives are very 'sexy' indeed. If aesthetics are what you're going for, then by all means get it. Like I said though, don't buy into the whole 'Mac Ready' and 'Time Machine Ready' as any drive is usable on a Mac, you just have to take a few extra steps - formatting the drive which takes less than a minute.

You can, get the same performance in a less expensive drive+enclosure setup. The enclosure you can look for yourself as I don't know what appeals to you visually, but you should be getting a USB 3.0 capable drive for maximum speed. Since this is for a iMac TimeMachine, I'm assuming you won't be moving it much so get a 3.5 drive. You should aim for a 7200RPM harddrive, but the difference for a TimeMachine backup disk is negligible. It's going to be connected to the iMac all the time so the few minutes saved from backing up you won't even notice.