External Hard Drive question

[bcab14]

I am looking at getting an external hard drive very quickly to back up mainly music, pictures and some personal files. I am looking at the WD passport Studio 320GB and it says that with Tiger you need backup software. Do i actually need this software or can i just plug in the drive and drag and drop it with no compression?? i know i wont use 320GB ever.

second question is if this Hard drive is any good or does anyone have other suggestions on a better model that i can get in the next couple days.

 

[gsahli]

Yes you can drag and drop. There's also freeware backup software available at versiontracker.com.

Some people here have drive brand preferences. I may have just been lucky, but I just go with the best deal (unless they won't/can't tell you the brand name). I own several WD drives, internal and external - all working fine. Also have Seagate and Samsung and Hitachi and others - working fine.

Good luck

 

[Cave Man]

You'll need to reinitialize the drive as OS X HFS+ with journaling enabled. If you ever plan to use it as a bootable drive on an Intel-Mac, then you'll also need to enable GUID partition table under the Partition tab of Disc Utility.

Personally, I wouldn't buy a WD drive. All three desktops that I've owned have failed and their customer service is atrocious. Samsung or Seagate for me (although my 2-week old 1.5 TB Seagate drive just failed and is in process of being replaced). I'm neutral on Hitachi. The one drive I owned (IBM) worked great for more than 5 years until I retired it.

 

[mattyxxl]

I suggest macsales.com

I just bought a drive from macsales.com OWC On-the-go 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache 3.0Gb Sec. I love it.. I went with the USB / Firewire 400 and 800 option. It is super fast. I ordered it last night..like 7 or 8pm and got it today.. very nice product.. and great shipping.

 

[Dave-S]

I'm new to mac so please bear with the basic questions. Do i have to buy a mac specific external hard drive or can i just buy any external hard drive and plan on reformatting it to HFS

 

[spice weasel]

I'm new to mac so please bear with the basic questions. Do i have to buy a mac specific external hard drive or can i just buy any external hard drive and plan on reformatting it to HFS

Any drive will do. Just launch Disk Utility and reformat as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If you want to be able to read and write to the drive from either a Mac or a PC, format as FAT.

 

[mknawabi]

If you have your files organized properly, drag and drop will be fine. You can even create a bash script and cron it, so that it is automated. Thank goodness for the power of the shell