Advice on External Hard Drive

[SDDave2007]

I currently have a MacPro with 1TB of Hard Disk, and will soon be buying my wife a MBP which she will run in "Clamshell" with external keyboard and Monitor.

What would be a good external drive setup that can easily be shared between the two Macs [wired or wireless] and could be used both as "common file area", and by TimeMachine on both computers?

 

[gr8tfly]

I have a couple of Seagate FreeAgent drives. Though I'm not wild about the orange light stripe, they are very solidly build and fanless. Almost totally quiet, which is important to me. There's a version of the Pro model which comes with eSATA/USB2 and Firewire 400 interface modules.

Looks like Fry's has the 750GB version on sale: http://shop3.outpost.com/{OaXS-PXUfGpxMo+NqfEBmw**.node1}/product/5217437;jsessionid=OaXS-PXUfGpxMo+NqfEBmw**.node1?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

 

[SDDave2007]

Great ... but how does that get shared between two computers? It looks like easy to connect via FW or USB to one.... but I want either something that both can plug into... or that maybe can be plugged directly into my router???

 

[roland.g]

Get an OWC Mercury Elite AL or a Cool Drives, something that comes with an Oxford 924 chipset, which will give you 2 FW800, 1 FW400 and a USB2.0 port. Then you can run FW800 to each machine. I would recommend getting either the Dual Case and a couple drives, or a prefilled RAID solution, OWC has them in 800GB(2x400) and 1TB(2x500) models on sale for $315-350. You can then set them in JBOD mode so that each drive is independant, using one for TM and the other for Shared Data. You may even want to partition the TM drive so that each machine has its own part, though honestly I would use one of the two drives for shared, the other for TM on the laptop, and add another internal to the bays for TM on the MacPro (assuming that you still have 1 of 4 bays open, and that even though "internal" TM will let you use an internal non-system drive on a MacPro for backup - the real fear is that your main fails, not that the whole system burns up and kills all you internal drives. It seems a real shame if Apple has a tower that can hold 4 drives but would force you to connect an external for TM).

Anyway, yes, get a Dual case and drop a couple drives in there.

800GB

1TB

Case

Cool Drives

 

[roland.g]

Great ... but how does that get shared between two computers? It looks like easy to connect via FW or USB to one.... but I want either something that both can plug into... or that maybe can be plugged directly into my router???

TM won't work over the Airport Extreme Airdisk, not at this point anyway, and not sure about how it is working with networked drives.

 

[SDDave2007]

Not using Airport... I have a Linksys wired/wireless router....
And everything I've read latelly is 100% conflicting... some say TM does work with a wired NAS, others say it does not

 

[gr8tfly]

TM won't work over the Airport Extreme Airdisk, not at this point anyway, and not sure about how it is working with networked drives.

It'll work over the network via file sharing, if the drive is connected to the MacPro. But, it's very slow (over wireless), and you can't do the initial backup hard-wired, then switch to shared.