External hard drive

[ParanoidRobot18]

Hi,

I want to buy an external hard drive for my new iMac just for backing up stuff, I'm not going to be carrying it around. It's really just incase the iMac crashes or whatever.

However I just wanted to make sure that if the iMac does crash and I need to do a boot from the drive does it have to be a firewire drive? I'm not sure if USB 2.0 works or not for booting off the drive.

Thanks in advance

 

[ivi7]

You can boot off a usb drive.
As far as an external is concerned you can look into Western Digital drives.
I have had good experiences with that. Choosing a drive depends on what capacity you want it to be and how much your willing to spend on it

 

[Trepex]

I'd suggest the Seagate FreeAgent Pro drives. They come in a variety of sizes, they are very reasonably priced, and they come with a 5-year warranty which is quite unheard-of.

Another nice bonus is that the FreeAgent Pro comes with interchangeable modules so that you can plug in via Firewire, USB, or eSATA

 

[ParanoidRobot18]

Great, thanks for the replies.

Firewire drivers were too dear to be honest, I'm going to buy a Western Digital Mybook as its only £52 for a 250GB version. I'm only using 120GB on my mac right now and it has a 300GB hard drive.

I won't need to backup boot camp as it will be just games and no important stuff.

Thanks again

Actually I think I might change that to a Seagate like you suggested The seagate is only £43.99 and I had used an internal seagate drive before and it was good quality.

 

[O. Frabjous-Dey]

I own a 500GB FreeAgent and a 500GB My Book from Western Digital.

They've both been rock-solid since I got them, but the My Book is significantly louder when it spins up or down after a long period of use/disuse.

You can't go wrong either way, in my opinion.