Read a review on WD 1 TB for Mac that was on sale for $70 (?) @ best buy... said it stopped working after few months........ any better recommendation ?
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external HD
- Thread starter bluebird3
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There is no such thing as external hard drives "For Mac". It's a marketing scheme to get you to spend more money. Any external hard drive will work on a Mac, it simply needs to be formatted to a Mac compatible file system before use. You can do that in less than 5 minutes using OS X's built in disk utility.
All hard drives eventually fail, by the way. It's a question of when, not if. Having a review that says a drive died after a few months should not deter you from buying it. Duds happen, and that's what a warranty is for.
simonsi
Contributor
Its not human nature for owners of anything who have no problems to go and post such on the internet. Hence any list of reviews or reports will be heavily biased towards reporting issues as it isn't a proper sample of the device's performance.
The only companies making drives and longer are pretty much WD and Seagate (they bought everybody else out). One is as good as another. Just grab whatever WD or Seagate USB3 drive you can find on sale.
Posts along the lines of "I owned X and it broke" don't really mean much in the bog scheme of things.
OK thank you very much for the answers.
Just something else came up..... What do you think of taking an old HD from an older Mac, put a protective case cover on it and use that as an external HD ? I know my old Mac HD is full but this way I am thinking I don't have to pay someone to data transfer into my newer Mac. Has anyone done this ?
Just something else came up..... What do you think of taking an old HD from an older Mac, put a protective case cover on it and use that as an external HD ? I know my old Mac HD is full but this way I am thinking I don't have to pay someone to data transfer into my newer Mac. Has anyone done this ?
You can take an old drive and use it in an enclosure, but I'm not clear how you are wanting to use it? Do you mean to boot from or just for backup or what?
Well, I'm getting a new Mac soon and first I was thinking about doing a data (iTunes music, photos, documents, bookmarks, address book , etc ) transfer from old to new, but generally apple/bb would charge you about $80. Next,I thought about transferring data to memory stick or external HD (I have to look for an after market older external that's compatible with my older Mac). Then, I learned I could just take out the HD from an old Mac plug it into a new Mac whenever I need to. I just wasn't sure is this was a good way to do it. I'll eventually get rid of the old HD but it will be a while.
A proper backup would also take care of this nicely.
With time machine setup, you could go out and buy a new Mac tomorrow, have it use migration assistant to import files and settings from your time machine backup, and be up and running just like on the old mac in a matter of a few hours.
Oh okay... so you have an older Mac and want to move the data to your new one when it comes? Yes, you can just out the drive from the old Mac in an external enclosure then import from that.
When you get a new Mac and first turn it on it asks you to select a language and time zone etc, then it will ask if you want to import data from another Mac or drive. Just tell it yes and follow the prompts and point it to the old disk in the USB enclosure and it will import your user account and all your apps and data.
Time machine set up ? I wonder if I can do this with my old Mac ? ( power Mac G4 MDD, OS 10.6.8).
Meister
Suspended
I have a freecom 1tb that landed 1st place in every review i read and a 2tb toshiba that also ended up in the top5. Are these two brands owned by wd and seagate?
I don't think you're on OS X 10.6.8 seeing as Snow Leopard does not run on PowerPC. Are you sure you aren't on 10.5?
I have a lot of confidence in WD. I have only had one WD hard drive fail and it happened yesterday on a drive made in 2007 and used every day.
Read what I said again. I was talking about making the drives themselves. WD and Seagate have either bought out or merged with every other drive maker out there that I can find. For example here is a release on the Toshiba WD deal. If you read reviews of Freecom drives, they are using Toshiba drives and Toshiba is now in bed with WD. So yeah... WD and Seagate is pretty much it now.
Meister
Suspended
I see. I dont want to get off topic but this is a bit concerning because it happens everywhere.
Did you know that Wrigley's makes pretty much all gum?
Similar thing is happening with flash storage controllers it seems. Big drive companies are buying up the controller makers to keep other drive makers out of the market. Interesting to watch.
Now I do! 😀
Fishrrman
macrumors Nehalem
To the OP:
Are you still shopping for a hard drive?
Why not put one together yourself?
It's so easy, that even -I- could do it !
First, get something like this from amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Optimized-Ina...7076164&sr=8-1&keywords=inateck+2.5+usb3+uasp
Then buy a 2.5" "bare drive" from the vendor of your choice.
A good place to keep an eye out for pricing is dealmac.com
The drive enclosure above doesn't even need a screwdriver for assembly -- just slide cover off, drop drive in, slide cover back on -- ready to go. It's like putting a book into a drawer.
Initialize the drive with Disk Utility, use HFS+, journaling enabled.
You'll have a home-built drive that you put together, so if you ever have a problem with it, you know how to take it back apart...
Also -- DON'T PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO MIGRATE YOUR DATA.
(Shouting intentional).
You can do it yourself!
Be aware that if you are moving from an older PowerPC-based Mac to something brand new, your old apps may no longer run (unless they are "universal binary", which means they can run on both PPC and Intel platforms).
We don't have enough info about what apps you'll be using, what kind of data you've built up though the years, etc.
But in your case, it might be better to get the new Mac up-and-running BEFORE you attempt to migrate anything. I would set it up with a "temporary" account first. Give it a generic name, like "administrator".
Then, you might use Migration Assistant to "bring over" your old account, settings and data.
Migration Assistant can migrate apps as well, but again, some apps may be incompatible with the new hardware.
Are you still shopping for a hard drive?
Why not put one together yourself?
It's so easy, that even -I- could do it !
First, get something like this from amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Optimized-Ina...7076164&sr=8-1&keywords=inateck+2.5+usb3+uasp
Then buy a 2.5" "bare drive" from the vendor of your choice.
A good place to keep an eye out for pricing is dealmac.com
The drive enclosure above doesn't even need a screwdriver for assembly -- just slide cover off, drop drive in, slide cover back on -- ready to go. It's like putting a book into a drawer.
Initialize the drive with Disk Utility, use HFS+, journaling enabled.
You'll have a home-built drive that you put together, so if you ever have a problem with it, you know how to take it back apart...
Also -- DON'T PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO MIGRATE YOUR DATA.
(Shouting intentional).
You can do it yourself!
Be aware that if you are moving from an older PowerPC-based Mac to something brand new, your old apps may no longer run (unless they are "universal binary", which means they can run on both PPC and Intel platforms).
We don't have enough info about what apps you'll be using, what kind of data you've built up though the years, etc.
But in your case, it might be better to get the new Mac up-and-running BEFORE you attempt to migrate anything. I would set it up with a "temporary" account first. Give it a generic name, like "administrator".
Then, you might use Migration Assistant to "bring over" your old account, settings and data.
Migration Assistant can migrate apps as well, but again, some apps may be incompatible with the new hardware.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
That will cause problems with Migration Assistant and is a bad idea. A new account will be user ID 501 and the users account on the old machine may also be UID 501 and if you import that old account with Migration Assistant it will cause the account to be assigned UID 502 and then it will be unable to access old backups or external data from the 501 account.
Fishrrman
macrumors Nehalem
The UID's you mention have something to do with Time Machine backups, I presume?
The method I suggested was exactly what I did when I first bought and setup the 2012 Mini I'm using now.
That is:
- create temporary "administrative" account
- immediately create a "cloned archive" of the OS to another drive using CarbonCopyCloner
- hook up my backup drive (again, a CCC clone)
- use Migration Assistant to bring over what I wanted.
It worked fine.
But again, I didn't use Time Machine.
It is not just related to Time Machine. It would be related to any backup or other partitions anywhere you had files under the original 501 account. When trying to access those files from the new 502 (or higher) account you would have a permissions problem.
In your case you could easily overcome it by telling your CCC clone disk to ignore permissions on the whole disk, and you could get in.
Following your example, that temp account you made would have been 501, then when you imported with Migration Assistant it would have seen 501 was not available and changed your UID to 502 during the import.
If you look now your UID is going to be 502 (or higher). I does not really create any issue for you now other than potentially complicating access to older backups/files on other partitions and drives.
If you did this before with your Mac you owned before the 2012 Mini your account may already have been switched to 502.
In your example, to avoid this what you could have done is make the temp account during setup like you did and that would be 501. Then make a second temp account and that would be 502. Now delete the first 501 temp account and then run Migration Assistant. If you do it that way your 501 account from the clone/backup would come in as 501 since no 501 account exists on that machine.
If you had two accounts on the backup disk you would want to make a third temp at 503 and delete 501 and 502 and then run MA. You get the idea.
It does not matter if you use a clone or Time Machine or even direct from another Mac, you have this issue.
There is a pretty good explanation of it all here in the pink section.