Best External Hard Drive For 2006/7 Emac?

[kikidoom]

looking for a 1 TB or 360GB External Hard Drive For My emac.

Processor : 1.25 GHZ power PC G4

Memory : 768 MB DDR SDRAM

Disk Has 4.9 GB memory Left. Want To Expand It Before Christmas.


Want Something Fast , But Cheapish Too ...

HELP!

 

[hughvane]

looking for a 1 TB or 360GB External Hard Drive For My emac.

I think you'll find they're 320 Gb, but why the choice between two vastly different-sized drives? 1 Tb is a massive storage amount for a single desktop computer, unless of course you have a lot of movies and photos.

Value for money based on $/Gb tends to support Western Digital, followed by Hitachi, with Seagate in third place. With one exception, the difference/Gb is not great.

Want Something Fast, But Cheapish Too ...

Seagate Barracuda is probably your best option (but personally I prefer Hitachi). I note on a price spy website I'm looking at, that the Hitachi Deskstar 1 Tb drive has a high user rating of 8/10; the Seagate Barracuda the same at a slightly cheaper price. The Western Digital Caviar 1 Tb is about the same price as the Hitachi, but with a 9/10 user rating.

A much-recommended place to shop for good Mac-compatible hardware is OWC http://www.macsales.com/. Not the cheapest. You can probably save yourself some money by buying the drive and enclosure separately. Make sure you get a combo USB/Firewire enclosure, preferably with Oxford chipset. Again, not the cheapest.

Another option is to operate the external hard drive 'bare' with a USB adaptor kit. That's the cheaper way to go, but no firewire.

 

[OldMike]

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A much-recommended place to shop for good Mac-compatible hardware is OWC http://www.macsales.com/.

I agree. I have been through a ton of externals and really like the three I purchased from OWC. I would recommend getting something like:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEAQ7S1TB32M/

The nice thing about these is that the quad interface has Firewire 800, Firewire 400, USB 2, and eSATA. So while you have your emac, you can use the fastest interface available to you (FW400 I'm assuming), and if you upgrade from your emac the drive is still plenty quick through FW800 or eSATA - depending on what you upgrade to.

I have mine running 24/7 (I actually boot off of mine and don't even use the internal drive in my iMac) and have never had an issue with any of them. Even if they cost a little more - in my opinion they are well worth it...