A good external hard drive for Macbok pro

[prafulgupta]

Hey Guys ... i have one of the new unibody MBPs and wanted to buy an external hard drive for time machine backups and also for some of my personal stuff from other machines. Are there any recommendations?
I do want to get something at least 500 Gb for sure. Also, there are lot of options for eSATA, USB, Firewire, any pointers on these would also be helpful. Thanks

 

[Mattym62]

check out western digital . I have a 320GB portable and its awesome! Haven't had any problems and its flawless

 

[gr8tfly]

I just bought a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB, FW800 (x2) for $139 at Frys. It's already formatted for Mac and TimeMachine (10.5) (not that it's a big deal to format a drive...).

It's quieter than some of the older FreeAgent Pro's I have (not sure what model drive either of them use, exactly). Spindle noise is about the same (quiet), but there's an improvement in head seeking noise - it's very quiet. The case design is much more in line with current the Apple line, too - brushed aluminum, white trim, and white LED illumination of the base and logo.

One of the big attractions of this drive is FW800. Most of the time, I find them to be much more expensive [than FW400]. The current FW800 drive I have was built up from bare drive and separate case (Rosewill).

On speed: FW400 beats USB2 by quite a bit, for most tasks. FW800 beats them both. I've measured about a 50% increase in speed using FW800 over 400 (to/from the internal SATA), seeing >60MB/sec (in Activity Monitor).

The only faster interface would be eSATA, but that requires an ExpressCard adapter and doesn't daisy chain. (I have 5 drives and a LightScribe burner on my FW800 chain. btw - when mixing 800 and 400, put the FW800 at the head of the chain)

edit: if you're looking for a bus powered portable, the WD is a good choice. For best speed - get one in a FW800 case (you can get them from OWC, or put one together yourself. I just bought a 2.5" Rosewill FW800 (2x) enclosure from NewEgg for <$50).

 

[aleni]

check out western digital . I have a 320GB portable and its awesome! Haven't had any problems and its flawless

+1.

i own WD passport 250GB, and it's so convenient to use everywhere. it's small..

 

[Erendiox]

I'd stay away from Western Digital drives personally... I've seen too many of them fail in my experience. Lacie drives aren't bad if you're on a budget.

If you're savvy enough to put a drive into an enclosure, I'd definitely recommend seagate, toshiba, or hitachi drives into a nice enclosure, like a Macally enclosure.

 

[prafulgupta]

eSATA vs FW800

Should I look for eSATA vs FW800? I have some coupons for Best Buy so was gonna use them. Thx for the earlier replies.

 

[bcburrows]

Firewire

FW800 is lighteningly fast, but not exactly universally used, so if dedicated to the MBP def go for firewire, if you want something that can be shared around a bit then USB...

 

[miles01110]

I'd stay away from Western Digital drives personally... I've seen too many of them fail in my experience. Lacie drives aren't bad if you're on a budget.

LaCie does not make hard drives, they make enclosures.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Our Macs have destroyed the boot sectors on 4 Lacie units, one seagate, and a little toshiba drive that came in some now long-lost enclosure.

That pattern is always the same. Formats it, cant format it, spews junk files all over it, then the volume isn't even recognized, then the boot partition information is wiped out and the drive is lost forever, having no idea what or how big itself is, on a mac or a PC, plied with any number of recovery programs.

 

[Erendiox]

Wirelessly posted (Erendiox: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

I'd stay away from Western Digital drives personally... I've seen too many of them fail in my experience. Lacie drives aren't bad if you're on a budget.

LaCie does not make hard drives, they make enclosures.

Oh I know. I was just referring to their pre-built drive and enclosure offerings. Shouldve been more specific.

 

[cmwade77]

I got this one from Toshiba:
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Portable-External-Drive-Black/dp/B001LK6XFY

It doesn't require any external power, which was a huge plus for me. and the price is good as well. In addition a few people at my work have used them for ears (smaller size for them though) and they have held up extremely well.