Looking to pick up an external HD

[Barhen]

I am hoping to get some advice on a Hard drive to get today..
It would be for my rmbp and my roommates' mac mini. We plan to share it so we were wondering whats the best way to do this?

External plugged into one of our machines? usb3.0? TB? or plugged into our router as lan? Putting it on the network or however it works. I am new to "network drives" and was wondering the best way to do this..we aren't looking to spend more than $100..

If it can keep backups of both of our machines, that is a plus too but mostly we both want extra space.. (she is running on 128SSD and I am on 256SSD)

Thanks!

 

[justperry]

Good luck with finding a NAS for $100

If your router has USB you it might be possible to use that, but I think the best way here is to get a USB 3 HD and backup separately or share the drive from one to the other computer.
If you choose lets say a 1 TB drive you should partition it as two 500 GB partitions so each has it's own.
Would be easier for TimeMachine as well if you use it.

 

[Giuly]

If you can find $35 somewhere between your couch cushions, the 2TB Western Digital Live NAS is an option.

There's also a 2TB Iomega NAS hard drive for $99, but it doesn't have the cool cloud features (Dropbox integration) of the Western Digital, so you can't access files on the go from your smartphone etc.

 

[Barhen]

Good luck with finding a NAS for $100

If your router has USB you it might be possible to use that, but I think the best way here is to get a USB 3 HD and backup separately or share the drive from one to the other computer.
If you choose lets say a 1 TB drive you should partition it as two 500 GB partitions so each has it's own.
Would be easier for TimeMachine as well if you use it.

Would this mean we would both have to plug it in and pass it back and forth to store stuff/run backup etc?

----------

If you can find $35 somewhere between your couch cushions, the 2TB Western Digital Live NAS is an option.

This looks great, thanks for the link... is this a good way of doing what we want? backups and storage for 2 different users at same time?

 

[justperry]

If you can find $35 somewhere between your couch cushions, the 2TB Western Digital Live NAS is an option.

There's also a 2TB Iomega NAS hard drive for $99, but it doesn't have the cool cloud features (Dropbox integration) of the Western Digital, so you can't access files on the go from your smartphone etc.

A 2 TB NAS for $99, WOW, that seems to be a good deal, I thought they were much more expensive, must have been asleep for a few years.

 

[Barhen]

slighty off-topic but semi-related

sharing a NAS between 2 users, what's the best way to setup timemachine (which I assume is like windows' restore) for both machines?

 

[Weaselboy]

slighty off-topic but semi-related

sharing a NAS between 2 users, what's the best way to setup timemachine (which I assume is like windows' restore) for both machines?

Assuming the NAS supports using Time Machine, you just connect the NAS to the network then when you turn on TM on each machine you just point to the NAS drive as the backup destination and TM takes care of the rest. TM will put the backups for each machine inside a sparse bundle image named for that machine and there will be no conflict.

 

[xnatex]

If you can find $35 somewhere between your couch cushions, the 2TB Western Digital Live NAS is an option.

There's also a 2TB Iomega NAS hard drive for $99, but it doesn't have the cool cloud features (Dropbox integration) of the Western Digital, so you can't access files on the go from your smartphone etc.

I have this, and it's awesome! Do yourself do backups via Ethernet instead of wifi. It's obviously way faster. You can also create different "shares" on it and password protect each one individually. The web interface that it has is also extremely easy to use.