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Vanessa01

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 27, 2013
1
0
Calgary, AB
Hi,
I just recently upgraded my '06 17inch 1.87ghz iMac to the new i5 2.9ghz iMac and am loving it! I've had a couple of issues though. I had an external WD 1TB MyBook Essential to back up my stuff but most importantly for my movies. I've got close to 300gb. With Mountain Lion my HD kept ejecting. Which was annoying because when I was trying to stream my movies to Apple TV through Air Video off of my HD it kept stopping and restarting. After going through a lot of forums and hearing what other people were going through, I just uninstalled the WD smart ware and never re installed it. I can still back up things on TM and still access my flies. I'm wondering though, since my iMac has 3.0 usb and my HD is 2.0 will this slow things down? When I transfer files back in forth from HD to desktop. Sorry might be an obvious question.
Here's the thing, I've got a pretty fast machine. I want to take full advantage of it. I want to keep my movies on an external Hard drive and then through Airvideo stream it to my apple tv to watch them there. I would also like to back up my stuff with time machine. The only thing I'd like to keep on my desktop is music and pics. But maybe i can transfer pics over too if that slows down my computer and it doesn't take too long to transfer back and forth. Any suggestions? Thanks for your patience with this :)
 

paulrbeers

macrumors 68040
Dec 17, 2009
3,963
123
Hi,
I just recently upgraded my '06 17inch 1.87ghz iMac to the new i5 2.9ghz iMac and am loving it! I've had a couple of issues though. I had an external WD 1TB MyBook Essential to back up my stuff but most importantly for my movies. I've got close to 300gb. With Mountain Lion my HD kept ejecting. Which was annoying because when I was trying to stream my movies to Apple TV through Air Video off of my HD it kept stopping and restarting. After going through a lot of forums and hearing what other people were going through, I just uninstalled the WD smart ware and never re installed it. I can still back up things on TM and still access my flies. I'm wondering though, since my iMac has 3.0 usb and my HD is 2.0 will this slow things down? When I transfer files back in forth from HD to desktop. Sorry might be an obvious question.
Here's the thing, I've got a pretty fast machine. I want to take full advantage of it. I want to keep my movies on an external Hard drive and then through Airvideo stream it to my apple tv to watch them there. I would also like to back up my stuff with time machine. The only thing I'd like to keep on my desktop is music and pics. But maybe i can transfer pics over too if that slows down my computer and it doesn't take too long to transfer back and forth. Any suggestions? Thanks for your patience with this :)

No. Using a USB 2.0 hard drive on a USB 3.0 port will not slow the hard drive down or the computer. Just means that one USB port will run at 2.0 speeds.

As far as your videos/data/backups, frankly I've always used external USB or firewire drives for this purpose. Even a Blu-Ray video requires less than 10MB/s bandwidth which means you could easily stream multiple Blu-Rays off of one hard drive without running into bandwidth limitations. You could go to USB 3.0, but you probably won't notice a lot of difference. Your backups will probably take longer on USB 2.0 than 3.0, but it's a backup. How fast or slow the backup completes shouldn't be of concern.
 
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