Help On External Hard Drive

[wcbrownhound]

I am wanting to buy a Ext HD (500 G to 1 T) for my MacBook mainly for back up Pictures, Music and some video. I need some suggestions on What brand, Are they plug and play? Do they come formated for a Mac? Do you drag and drop to transfer to these Exts? I lost a bunch of stuff when the X screwed up the Mac. Little Help Thanks

 

[spinnerlys]

This might be a good start: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/8781694/

Brand: Western Digital, LaCie and Seagate are the ones recommended for consumer use.

Plug and Play: Mostly, but often they have to be formatted first with HFS+ (the file system for Mac OS), as many HDDs might come formatted with FAT32 and NTFS, which are used for Windows.
Know that HFS+ is not able to be read or written to by Windows, except with the help of MacDrive, and NTFS can only be written to by Mac OS X via MacFuse + NTFS-3G.

Drag and drop: Yes, as they behave like any other place you store data to connected to your computer.

 

[jstate1983]

Western Digital

I have a Western Digital 1 TB to backup my iMac and a 500 GB Passport to back up my MacBook Pro and I have been very satisfied with both. For you I would recommend a Western Digital Passport. The reason being that with the Passport you don't have to have an external power source. It is USB powered, so that makes it truly portable. The size needs to at least match what you have now. For instance I have a 500 GB HDD in my MacBook Pro so therefore I have a 500 GB external HDD. Nearly all of the Western Digital hard drives are Mac compliant. Just look for the symbol on the box. All of the Passports are MAc compatible. You simply plug in the drive for the first time and it will ask you if you would like to use that drive as your Time Machine backup. You simply say yes and it does the rest and ALWAYS runs in the background from then on out.

 

[WotanAgain]

They're all fairly similar. Whatever you do, make sure you get a Firewire drive. You really really don't want USB unless you enjoy crappy performance. USB hard drive performance sucks. period.

Also, for the 500 GB capacity, those are available in 2.5" sizes, and a Firewire 2.5" drive is bus-powered so no AC adapter is required! USB can power some 2.5" drives, while Firewire can power ALL 2.5" drives (and even multiple 2.5" drives at once).

and NTFS can only be written to by Mac OS X via MacFuse + NTFS-3G.

Not quite. Snow Leopard is the first OSX to have NTFS write support built in. It's just not enabled by default...

Also, what software do you plan to use for your backups? Are you backing up just individual files and folders? Or do you want a whole system backup? I have a 320 GB drive inside my MBP, and I have a Fw800 attached 320 GB drive that's for full system backup. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact clone of my internal disk, to this external Firewire disk.

The advantage of this solution over Time Machine or individual file / folder backups, is that the external disk made by Carbon Copy Cloner is *bootable*!!

So even if your internal disk completely crashes and you can't recover any data, you can still use your laptop by booting off the Firewire drive and everything appears there as normal!! Additionally, if someone were to steal your laptop, or it got lost or damaged, you could attach the CCC firewire drive to another MBP and boot it up and everything is there just like normal. It's really a nice solution.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

This might be a good start: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/8781694/

Brand: Western Digital, LaCie and Seagate are the ones recommended for consumer use.

Plug and Play: Mostly, but often they have to be formatted first with HFS+ (the file system for Mac OS), as many HDDs might come formatted with FAT32 and NTFS, which are used for Windows.
Know that HFS+ is not able to be read or written to by Windows, except with the help of MacDrive, and NTFS can only be written to by Mac OS X via MacFuse + NTFS-3G.

Drag and drop: Yes, as they behave like any other place you store data to connected to your computer.

Thanks for the love, spinnerlys. I have moved onto this.

The quoted advice regarding brands is still my thoughts though.

 

[spinnerlys]

Thanks for the love, spinnerlys. I have moved onto this.

The quoted advice regarding brands is still my thoughts though.

Ah, I was looking for that but couldn't find it in your signature link like before. Nicely done and quite extensive.

What would be a nice addition is the file system question regarding HFS+ (Journaled or not), FAT32 and NTFS and the accompanying software.
I offer my help if needed, and wanted.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

Ah, I was looking for that but couldn't find it in your signature link like before. Nicely done and quite extensive.

What would be a nice addition is the file system question regarding HFS+ (Journaled or not), FAT32 and NTFS and the accompanying software.
I offer my help if needed, and wanted.

Go for it, hard drives are not actually my thing. I just got sick of seeing two threads a day on it. Perhaps we find MacDawg's post that he often posted in those threads as well.