External HD advice

[Saint Luke]

Im going to pickup an external drive on the weekend and while not new to computers in any way, have only owned my MBP for 3 or 4 months. I made the assumption that an external drive is an external drive, and can be formatted in NTFS or whatever os x uses. But i noticed there was a mac version of the h/d, which cost an extra $40 or so. Is this crap (ie i cant be formatted to use any os), or do i really need to buy a mac specific h/d, as they are hard to get through normal pc shops and any local mac shops charge stupid amounts.

 

[miles01110]

Almost any hard drive can be reformatted to HFS+. You are wasting your money buying a "Mac" external drive.

 

[Saint Luke]

thats what i thought, cheers for that...

 

[-hh]

Almost any hard drive can be reformatted to HFS+. You are wasting your money buying a "Mac" external drive.

Agreed, if all other factors are equal.

However, sometimes one finds that the "Mac" version differs in what I/O ports the drive has. YMMV, but I'd pay an extra $40 to have Firewire in lieu of USB.


-hh

 

[Snowbound]

Agreed, if all other factors are equal.

However, sometimes one finds that the "Mac" version differs in what I/O ports the drive has. YMMV, but I'd pay an extra $40 to have Firewire in lieu of USB.


-hh

Yeah, that's what makes the decision harder. For example, the WD studio drives have firewire 400 on the portable drives (or firewire 800 on the desktop drives). The question is if the extra speed is worth the extra cost to you. If not, then go with any random USB drive and it'll work.

 

[rick3000]

FW800 is worth every penny over FW400 (an multiple pennies more over USB) in my opinion, it is noticeable faster.
I recently got a FW800 1TB Seagate Desk for Mac (the Mac model was the only one with FW800) drive for $150, which is not that much more that a FW400 1TB drive, especially when you consider the Seagate comes with a 5 year warranty. Plus if you get a FW400 drive you have to buy a $10 adapter to make it work with a MBP.