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External Hard Drive
- Thread starter droalex
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I use a Western Digital My Book Home Edition 500gb for my media, backups, and schoolwork
It is very fast and quiet, but there are two small annoyances with it-it makes a buzz when powering up and after it is in use for a few hours running iTunes music, the songs will occasionally skip (about once every 15 minutes after 4-5 hours of trouble free use)
I got it for about $120 at Costco and partitioned it into a Movies, Photos, iTunes, Backup, and Other partitions using Disk Utility
It comes formatted to Fat32 so you must first copy the included folder off the drive, then format it with Disk Utility
The included software in the folder on the disk just tells the drive how to light up.
It is very fast and quiet, but there are two small annoyances with it-it makes a buzz when powering up and after it is in use for a few hours running iTunes music, the songs will occasionally skip (about once every 15 minutes after 4-5 hours of trouble free use)
I got it for about $120 at Costco and partitioned it into a Movies, Photos, iTunes, Backup, and Other partitions using Disk Utility
It comes formatted to Fat32 so you must first copy the included folder off the drive, then format it with Disk Utility
The included software in the folder on the disk just tells the drive how to light up.
If you have a macbook or a mini, get a WD Passport. I got my 250gb on sale for $119. It will actually fit in a MB or mini so it's a economical upgrade. You can put your original hdd in the external enclosure and keep rolling. I leave my storebought externals formated for windows so I can hook it to my intel mac or any windows pc.
Not sure how much media you need to store with growing room, or your price range, so I'll recommend the ones I use and have had excellent success with.
Mercury on the Go
G-tech
Both options are compatible with both Mac and PC, and the links I provided give you a variety of configurations to suit your needs. I've purchased from both vendors with no problems. Good luck to you.
Mercury on the Go
G-tech
Both options are compatible with both Mac and PC, and the links I provided give you a variety of configurations to suit your needs. I've purchased from both vendors with no problems. Good luck to you.
I posted this same question and did a lot of research and the response I got was to stay away from the MyBooks. So I purchased a 500 gig Free Agent Drive this week at OfficeDepot for $100 which is part of the sale they are having this week. I've done some research and it seems like this is one of the best. Also you could get the 750 gig for $150. It ends Sunday though, just to let you know. I also have a WD Passport which I love. I haven't used it much because I don't have my Macbook yet but I'm going to use it for media storage like movies and music and it runs great. Hope that helped.
They just updated the firmware today and made the drive manager leopard compatible, so there aren't anymore problems with the drives, just be sure to update firmware.
They work just fine, and they work better on Firewire than USB-no problems with FireWire, USB will make the drive skip for some reason (and FireWire is faster)