Need a recommendation - external hard drive

dave.h.3g said:

What's up everyone,

I'm in the market for a new external hard drive, my old toshiba one is now full and I need something to backup my mac. Anyway, I've been looking around and can't figure out what to get/what works well with the mac. I'm looking to pay around $150 for at least 2TB if possible 3TB. And I'm running on OS x 10.5

was looking at this until I came upon all the reviews of reliability issues and mac problems
http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Minimus...343564404&sr=1-3&keywords=external+hard+drive

thanks

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Western Digital all the way. Their drives are affordable and they last. All of my drives are western Digital an they are great. They have survived military deployments, 3 moves within the US, and reformatting for different OS(from Windows to MAC OS X) I still have the 500GB external that I bought in 2007 and it works perfectly.

Best Buy has some pretty good deals...

3TB MyBook essential usb 3.0/2.0 for $149.99
Model: WDBACW0030HBK-NESN SKU: 1261281

And don't fall for the "Mac edition" or "formatted for Mac" crap. You can easily connect it and format it with disk utility and save yourself the "Mac tax" that retailers love.

dave.h.3g said:

thanks for the help, wd it is

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You're welcome. Just to elaborate as to why I really trust WD: My iMac and my wife's iMac came with a WD HDD in them and my wife has a 1TB external for her time machine backup and the "old" 500GB external to store her iTunes and iPhoto libraries. I have a 1TB MyBook mac edition(that I overpaid for at the Apple Store) that has been used used solely for my iTunes library and all my movies. I had 2 250GB WD my passport drives that were 4 years old when I gave them to friends as gifts back in 2008 and 2009. And according to both of them, they still work and those were the ones that I took on deployment with me.

Anyway, have fun!

On the other hand, you have people who'll swear by Seagate and won't touch Western Digital HDs. I've had a WD external HD fail on me, and I've had an Seagate internal drive fail. I don't think it matters - a mechanical HD will fail at some point, sooner or later.

Just don't make the external HD the only place you store stuff you want to keep.

I tottally support WD also, but you may want to look at Transcend, Freecom, G-Drive and Bufallo, they make some really good looking external HDs

From WD, Ive own several models, including 2x My Passport and 2x My Book. The My Book, wich features 3.5"drives are a little noisy. The My Passport are completly silent (as most 2.5"external drives) So you may want to consider getting a 1TB My Passport for a totally silent system.

Recently, WD released 2TB My Passport. I cant tell if this paritucal model is silent, as I believe it uses double platerns and therfore, its very likelly it makes some kind of noise.

Another vote for the passports. They're very quiet and work fairly well. I've had a bunch in the past few years with 2 failing after about a year. WD replaced them quickly.

The two that I had issues with were both, interestingly enough, the 'mac' versions of their drives.