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Mac External Har Drive (Did I need it?)

M

Mac2004

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 17, 2004
295
43
I have a Power Mac G5 (dual 1.8) with a 160GB hard drive (114GB is still available). I went out and bought a Western Digital My Book external hard drive as they were on sale at Best Buy (320GB for $169). Now I am questioning if I should have even purchased this external hard drive or not since I still have 114GB left on my computer hard drive and I only use my computer for home office use. I could just back up my photos and music on a DVD instead. What does everyone think?

How important is it to have an external hard drive if I still have 114GB left on my current one?

Also, is the Western Digital My Book the best external hard drive made for a Mac? Quality and reputation is very important to me.
 
i dont know your needs but obviously you bought it with some thought process. why buy things you dont need and lol why ask us to validate your purchases if we dont know your needs? an external is nice if you need files and dont want to take the whole machine

start saving all of your movies so you can have them on demand is what i would do
 
i say the external was a great buy because it's much easier to make backups to an external hard drive than to DVDs.

i have no experience with Western Digital. my current external drive is a Maxtor (which works exceptionally well) and i used to have a LaCie mobile which i sold because it was too small for my needs (it, too, worked well).
 
I was about to get one of those things but used money towards new MacBook instead. That was a smoking deal on it. I then balked because I didn't think I could use 320GB. I mean, it's nice to have, but why spend the money if you're not gonna fill it up. The drive would have crashed and burned long before I would have filled it up methinks.
 
Mac2004 said:
Also, is the Western Digital My Book the best external hard drive made for a Mac? Quality and reputation is very important to me.
Click to expand...

There is no standard best but I have a mybook 400 gb for about $150 at best buy at some random great sale (fw400 as well). So yeah, is it a good drive? It's proven to be louder than my lacie but it's been better.

Now, do you need it? When your mac drive crashes and you know you've backed everything up on a second drive regardless of how much space you have you will thank yourself for having it.
 
dukebound85 said:
but what about backing up that hard drive to dvds lol just in case

once we get blu ray or hd dvd burners, imagine having all 30gigs of your music on ONE disc or 2 at most. talk about sweet
Click to expand...

Well the problem with backing up to DVD for me is that is 126 gb plus the system which is a separate drive so thats another 35 gb. So thats around 33 dvds......I don't want to burn 33 dvds it takes way to long! And not all my data is crucial...like I could live without most of it..So 1 backup is fine for me.:D
 
trainguy77 said:
Well the problem with backing up to DVD for me is that is 126 gb plus the system which is a separate drive so thats another 35 gb. So thats around 33 dvds......I don't want to burn 33 dvds it takes way to long! And not all my data is crucial...like I could live without most of it..So 1 backup is fine for me.:D
Click to expand...

haha yea i know what you mean. i HATE burning dvds for back up purposes as it wastes my time it seems.
 
andmill said:
dude... you have a powermac, you can add an internal drive for backing up
Click to expand...

Actually its an intel system...I was saying how I have a external Hard drive for backups(which is safer as it can be disconnected) dukebound85 just mentioned I should have 2 backup sets....Read the thread before you post next time please.
 
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