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Need help on buying an external HD

D

dschiller

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 7, 2007
138
0
Hi all

I am looking for an external HD with 750Gb. USB 2.0 is a must-have, and FW400 support is (very) welcome.

I have no idea which brand/model I should go for. I have a Mac Mini and a W$ PC, but I don't really care about in which format the HD comes pre-formated, since I'd have no problems in reformating it (duh):p .

Any advice is welcome!

Best
Daniel
 
The best bang for the buck is to by an internal drive and an enclosure and build your own.

By the way, I didn't build my own. I have a 500GB WD My Book and it's pretty good.
 
plinden said:
The best bang for the buck is to by an internal drive and an enclosure and build your own.

By the way, I didn't build my own. I have a 500GB WD My Book and it's pretty good.
Click to expand...
I suggest building your own as well. You can get this enclosure then buy some HDs that are on sale. I bought 2 500GB Seagate HDs from Fry's for $120 each. Pretty good deal compared to others.

Nuc
 
Nuc said:
I suggest building your own as well. You can get this enclosure then buy some HDs that are on sale. I bought 2 500GB Seagate HDs from Fry's for $120 each. Pretty good deal compared to others.

Nuc
Click to expand...
I also recommend the OWC Mercury Elite enclosures. I have six of them with a 500GB drive in each (I don't have the dual-chassis ones but wish I did). I also recommend a pair of 500's over a 750 as they're cheaper, hold more, and reduce your chances of losing everything when one fails.
 
reformatting

about this..i used my external hard drive on an xp pc and now i use it on my mac..how come i cant cut and paste items between my drive and mac? it says cannot be modified? so it seems i need to reformat this drive? how can i do this without losing my files? thanx
 
Anything with a Seagate drive inside and most definitely not a Western Digital. Seagates are the most reliable in my experience and Western Digitals are the most unreliable.
 
bams27 said:
about this..i used my external hard drive on an xp pc and now i use it on my mac..how come i cant cut and paste items between my drive and mac? it says cannot be modified? so it seems i need to reformat this drive? how can i do this without losing my files? thanx
Click to expand...
Your drive is formatted in a way the Mac can read but not write (as you realized) and needs to be reformatted (as you also realized), but I know of no way to reformat it without losing the information. You'd need to move it elsewhere, format, and move it back. You might be able to slowly move things to increasingly larger partitions, but that would be incredibly tedious compared to simply backing it up, reformatting it, and reinstalling the files.
 
That OWC Mercury Elite says it supports RAID, but then under specs it only says RAID 0. Does it support RAID 1 as well?
 
bams27 said:
about this..i used my external hard drive on an xp pc and now i use it on my mac..how come i cant cut and paste items between my drive and mac? it says cannot be modified? so it seems i need to reformat this drive? how can i do this without losing my files? thanx
Click to expand...

The Windows program Partition Magic allows you to convert from NTFS (which must be the format your drive is in if your Mac can't write to it) to FAT32, which Macs can write to, without "losing data". However, it sometimes screws up and you should make a backup anyway if you decide to do that. In which case you may as well reformat and not bother paying for it.

MacFUSE and ntfs-3g is another possibility but it's not really ready for the less technically oriented folk out there.
 
Building your own is certainly the way to go for a new drive, but I've had great luck buying slightly older and slower firewire drives from ebay and saved tons of money. And do you really need the very fastest speed???

-T
 
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