EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES

I would recommend getting a firewire external enclosure from newegg.com and puting an internal HD into it. Internal drives are much less expensive than external drives and the enclosures are also very cheap. Format your HD to FAT32 and it will be compatible with Windows too.

Best wishes,
JOD8FY

NEWEGG.COM.....WARNING!!!

Watch out for newegg....This is an odd story, but i assure you, it's completely true.

So i was in the market for a new firewire HD, just as you are. I looked on newegg, but decided not to buy from them. At no point did I even start to place an order, let alone contact them. Less than a week later, a mysterious gigantic charge shows up on my father's credit card. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but how in the hell would newegg have gotten his credit card info if no order had ever been placed? Just watch out when buying from smaller internet sites.

oh, and I ended up getting an OWC Mercury Elite 250gb firewire/usb 2.0 external. The thing i love most about it is its silent nature, having no loud fan. I'd check it out.

-klon

Newegg isn't the smallest of sites. I find it funny that you connect a big charge on that card with their site when it doesn't seem like you gave them any of your information.

But anyways, I've been using a LaCie 160 gig fw hd for a while now. I think it was around $160 or so. Seems reasonable priced to me, and what was also a big deal for me was the asthetic of the drive. It's beatiful. I think it looks great alone or coupled with the G5. Seems a little cheesy, but it was a big thing for me.

I have been ordering from Newegg for years and have had nothing but excellent CS! I don't know how you got a major charge like that, but unless you put in some kind of personal information and placed an order, there is no way they could have placed a charge on the card. Newegg is definitely one of the most reliable internet sites for buying computer parts in the world, just checkout their Reseller Ratings! Anyway, I just ordered a Western Digital 250GB Dual-Option backup from them for $250.00 Shipped with a $50 rebate, making it $200 in the end. Cheaper than buying an enclosure and 250GB hard drive, plus I get one button backups on my Mac!

Tyler.Schmaltz said:

I am currently looking to buy a external hard drive for my 700mhz g3 ibook. I am going to store videos, pictures, games and applications on it because my laptop hard drive is only 20 gb. I was wondering what is the best external firewire hard drive for under $180 but is at least a 60 gb. I would like to be able to use the hard drive on windows computers also but aint that important. I am going to be hauling it back and fourth from school almost everyweek so portability is a issue but size isn't that big of a issue. I am thinking about a lacie d2 120 gb hard drive or a simple tech 120gb. Any thought or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

I have ordered a 250gig LaCie after reading several reviews and decided it was the best choice. I think they are a safe bet but until I get mine I can't give a personal recommendation.

2.5" external drives
These are all fairly expensive, as they are 2.5" drives, but for 2.5" drives that come with exterrnal enclosures, they're really cheap. And according to.. cnet I believe it was, the site's reliable, so it's not a scam or anything. I just remembered them because you said portability was an issue.

edit: hmm.. I'm assuming the g3 ibooks don't have usb 2.0. That means these would all connect through USB 1.1. So they'll be really slow, but whatever...

pdpfilms said:

Watch out for newegg....This is an odd story, but i assure you, it's completely true.
...
-klon

Click to expand...

if you didn't even start an order how would they be involved?

Maybe im being defensive because my friends is one of the VP's, but I think you should be looking in a different place.


------
In any case, building your own is probably the best option, if you are competent enough to plug the drive in properly and snap the case closed that is.

I ordered an upgrade card from NewEgg then found it cheaper elsewhere the same day. I called to cancel my order - even though the item had not shipped yet they charged me a restocking fee. I will never buy from them again. As far as external FW drives go I second pdpfilms' suggestion of the OtherWorldComputing Mercury Elite drives - whisper quiet and reliable.

I have a 120 gb Western digital firewire/usb2 harddrive which is ok. the only thing that really bothers me is that it is not the most quietest of drives and that it can get kind of warm.

Weird

It looked to me that Newegg was completely certified and trustable as well. But no matter how trustable they are, a large charge still appeared on the card from newegg.com. No order was ever even started. I have no idea how this may have happened.
-klon

EDIT: I just noticed that i didn't previously say the charge was from newegg. If it was just a random charge, I'd have no reason to associate it with newegg.

pdpfilms said:

It looked to me that Newegg was completely certified and trustable as well. But no matter how trustable they are, a large charge still appeared on the card from newegg.com. No order was ever even started. I have no idea how this may have happened.
-klon

EDIT: I just noticed that i didn't previously say the charge was from newegg. If it was just a random charge, I'd have no reason to associate it with newegg.

Click to expand...

While that may be true, there still seems to be some large portion of the story missing. If you never started an order, how could they have possibly deduced your credit card information? Did they just pull it out of thin air?

spyware might be a likely culprit

Gimzotoy said:

While that may be true, there still seems to be some large portion of the story missing. If you never started an order, how could they have possibly deduced your credit card information? Did they just pull it out of thin air?

Click to expand...

not to mention resolution

I have three Lacie external 80gb hard drives and they rock. I used to have a Fantom 80gb HD but that failed on me after about 18 months.

I would also reccomend the buying the enclosure route. I have a 40gb drive that used to be in my ibook, and I purchased an enclosure for it... wham bam 40gb portable drive.

Sadly, the ibook was one of the logic board rejects that Apple settled that class action lawsuit over. I threw it down the trash chute about 5 weeks before that info was posted on Apple's website. /sigh

I have a Maxtor OneTouch 250gb usb/firewire HD, never actually installed the Dantz software to backup my files but I like the hard drive. If you remember the original FireWire HD problem with Panther 10.3.0, where if you format your internal HD and do a clean install from your CD and forgot to unhook the HD it would format your firewire hd too... This HD does not suffer from that problem, which is reassuring.

Got my LaCie d2 tripple 250 gig and its working a treat.

Software that came with it allows backup of my entire powerbook with relative ease.

Moved my 30 gigs of iTunes music across to free up space for video editing.

Only thing I can't get to work is daisy chaining with my video camera

I've got a 160gb maxtor one-touch usb/firewire drive.. i originally got it when i had a windows laptop with a titchy hard disk, i don't use it so much now i've got my powerbook..

Still, it worked instantly and was recognised as soon as i plugged it in (firewire and usb).. i've been quite happy with the drive so far (i've had it almost a year now with no trouble)..

My one complaint about it is that it's quite noisy... you don't notice after a while, but sometimes it shocks me a bit when i'm using it with my pb to suddenly hear silence! A nice little feature I *really* appreciate, my mac shuts down the external disk after its not been used for about 10 minutes..and then as soon as i want to use it again, it starts it instantly - it definitely cuts down on the amount of noise (it was certainly a nice surprise for me anyway after using it with windows where it would be on constantly)

My disk was £145 from http://www.ebuyer.com - you can probably get more gigs for less money now though..

I also looked at internal hard disks in an enclosure, but at least in the UK shops i went too, the enclosures alone were £70

As others have said, I'd suggest the generic enclosure and a standard drive. Cheaper that way and just as good as the more expensive "name" solutions. I also suggest either a Samsung drive or the 8mb cache Western Digital. Samsung is the only manufactorer still offering a 3 year warranty on all its drives while the WD 8mb cache Caviar also has a 3 year warranty.

I also have used newegg extensively and never had a problem with them.

I just posted a thread about my favorite external hard drive enclosure, sadly the company may have just closed.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/83996/

Lee Tom

Buy the largest Seagate Barracuda you can afford and put in the cheapest external case you can stand the sight of (eMagic has some relative cheape ones that's not very ugly, but there's lots of others out there) yourself.

The Barracudas are really quiet, compared with other HDs, and worth every penny...

I bought a LaCie 70GB Firewire drive which is preety quick and reliable. I have had no problems with it at all and one plus is it gives you two ports on the back so that you can daisy chain another fireiwre drive to it whenever you want to increase space....kind of a neat little feature.

Buslink hard drive question

I got what must have been a discontinued Buslink external hard drive -- only 30gb -- and tried to use it and some old Retrospect programs on my Tibook that had 10.2.8 on it. (it is an original PB 400mhz that then had a 10gb hard drive, so I figured the 30 gig was all I needed. I just upgraded my pb harddrive.)

It was all very confusing and nothing the Buslink literature said made any sense, mostly because this machine was made four years ago (though it was new in the box).

When I upgraded to Panther, I noticed it seemed to function as a oversized desktop hard drive okay, but I wasn't happy with it so I returned it today for a refund.

Here's my question -- I used the special Panther secure trash empty thing when I took files off of it. I don't know if there was any other erasing I could do than what I did. Should I insist that the small company I bought that thing from will do a better erase job or just forget it? No financial stuff, just some personal files.

Thanks from a longtime Mac lover, newbie to the site and to really understanding Macs.

Any advice on dropping internal drive into external hard drive enclosure cases?

Also, does anyone have any advice about dropping internal hard drives -- both my old 10gb PB laptop drive and an old iMac drive that both have OS X.3 on them -- into these external hard drive enclosure cases?

Any advice on USB vs Firewire or should I get a case with both configurations? And what about external power supply -- good or bad?

I was actually checking prices on this earlier, on http://www.pricewatch.com and saw one (I don't remember if it was FW or just USB) that was 200gig for about $125 before shipping.