External Hard Drive for Mac and PC

[inkster218]

Ive heard lots of good reviews for the Lacie HD's.

Can I use one of those to back up my PC and my PB (when I buy one)?

Any other recommendations?

Thanks~!

 

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says...there are lots of good drives out there - check some of the other threads. The Lacie ones are nice, as are the ones from OtherWorld. some people would also suggest just buying an enclosure and buying a drive and putting it together yourself. If you intend to use for both Mac and PC, and if the PC only has usb/usb2, you may want to be sure that the drive enclosure you buy has the best of both worlds (as many of them do). As I said, there are *many* threads here already about external drives...have a read through some of them and that should help you decide what is best for you....oh yeah!

 

[iBert]

You have to be careful here. If you want to use it in both platforms, you might bumo into problems. Remember you'll have to format the hard disk, but you'll have to choose one. From a little experience, I had to make a backup of 40gb of informtaion on an eMac. Used one of the hard drives we have and Windows couldn't read it. When transfering some files from a Windows machine to a Mac. At least with Panther, previous OS X couldn't see it, you'll be able to read only. You won't be able to write to it. look around more, make sure you'll be able to do what you want to do with it.

 

[blodwyn]

The problem with using external drives with mixed platforms is that you are usually stuck with FAT32, with it's file and partition size limitations. I just bought one of the new Linksys NSLU2 NAS storage controllers. This cost $99 and I added a 250Gb Maxtor drive and a 3.5" enclosure for a total cost of $310. It only took a few minutes to set it up on my home network, and is accessible from all my Linux and WinXP systems as well as my Powerbook. It's not a quick performer given it's USB2 drive interface, but it's great for backup or storing files that you might want to use on any system (MP3s, images, etc). It also has a backup utility built in that can be configured via it's web interface. It supports up to 2 drives and formats them with an EXT3 filesystem, but because the Linksys is effectively the fileserver, it's accessible from all platforms.

The lack of file and partition size limitations means you can store huge archive or movie files with no problems. It's a great solution for me anyway.