Newbie question-I just bought a 11" Mac Book Air and want to add a small external drive to safely back up my stuff. Is the G drive they sell at the apple store the route to go, or are there other quality drives that you'd recommend?
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back up external drive advice needed
- Thread starter livingsimply
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I tend to like Lacie drives. I also use Maxell, WD and Seagate. If they sell it in the Apple store, it still might be formatted NTFS or FAT32. The very first thing you should do with a new drive is format it HFS (journaled), unless you are planning to share that same external drive with another OS.
Most drives at the apple store are overpriced. I have two of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...BMCI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303083446&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...BMCI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303083446&sr=8-1
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Thats the same drive that I have and again i would highly recommend one.
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Do those WD drives still come with unremovable "smartware" hard-wired into the firmware? I was so effing annoyed having bought one a while ago and realizing it can't be removed.
Second result on google...
I have a 2TB WD usb drive but never saw the smartware VCD. I reformatted it as HFS (Journaled) so I could make it an external drive shared by my Time Capsule.
The last external Seagate HD came with the Paragon NTFS drivers for MAC included for free. Well, if you plan to use this drive for Time Machine, you'll need to format it as an Extended Mac Partition (journaled).
If you plan to use it for both Mac and Windows, format it as NTFS and take advantage of the free Paragon NTFS drivers.
Or format it as an Extended Mac Partition (journaled) and get MacDrive Pro to be able to access it from Windows.
If you plan to use it for both Mac and Windows, format it as NTFS and take advantage of the free Paragon NTFS drivers.
Or format it as an Extended Mac Partition (journaled) and get MacDrive Pro to be able to access it from Windows.
I really like the G-Drives that they have at the apple store, a little pricey, but for a G-Drive mini 500GB 7200RPM its built like a tank. Not many other drives have as good of enclosures as the G-Tech's IMO
For stationary backup drives, I'm a fan of buying one of these and tossing in whatever 3.5" drive you have sitting around (or just buying a bare drive for cheap). The enclosure is cheap, compact, well-built, and very easy to swap drives in and out of. I've got a separate Firewire enclosure for a scratch drive (as opposed to a backup), but it's a pain in the neck to swap the drive out.