Portable external drives??

[heyalan]

A question about portable external drives. I'm looking to transfer things from my old iBook G4 to a new Macbook Pro,....which by the way is a Beautiful machine. As I read about these drives, it many times seems to insinuate that I might not be able to select items to both transfer or later back up,...is this really the case?

Can anyone help clear up any misconceptions I may have built up reading the plethora of product reviews. Also, I am running Snow Leopard and I don't often see a full compatibility with SL mentioned.

Very much appreciate any help in this,...tired of reading....wanting to buy!!

 

[mscriv]

I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "might not be able to select items to both transfer or later back up." An external drive is just that an external drive. It will store any kind of media and you should be able to transfer anything between two macs as long as both have the appropriate connections required by the drive. As far as Snow Leopard compatibility, again, it's just an external drive and having different operating systems on different laptops should not make a difference. Now if you are trying to transfer files between Mac and PC then yes there are some formatting nuances you need to be aware of, but from your post it seems both of your machines are Apple laptops.

Generally, you should have no problems, however, if you would like to be more specific about what items or file types are concerning you then we might be able to be more specific in our answers.

 

[Niiro13]

What he said.

But maybe you're looking at some of the external drives which advertise features such as "automatic backup" or "automatic transfer"? Don't do that. In fact, wipe the drive of all that and just move all your files onto the drive.

I don't trust all the backup/transfer software the drives have on them.

 

[mscriv]

But maybe you're looking at some of the external drives which advertise features such as "automatic backup" or "automatic transfer"? Don't do that. In fact, wipe the drive of all that and just move all your files onto the drive. I don't trust all the backup/transfer software the drives have on them.

Good point Niiro13. Depending on the brand of drive you buy the automatic backup software is often PC based anyway. Also, lots of drive companies will sell a PC and a Mac version of the same drive. All this means is that the drive is generally pre-formatted HFS+ for Mac or NTFS for Windows. You can buy any drive you want and wipe and format it yourself as Niiro is saying. This could save you some money if you don't mind doing the format.

 

[heyalan]

Thanks mscriv and Niro 13 for your words of advice. I am teaching in a small town in Korea and have limited access to portable drives. Korean web sites show a number of WD drives including the Passport models for mac. G-Technology drives are also available but at an exaggerated price of well over 330.00,...Korea guards it's tech markets with added taxes. So my choices here are somewhat limited. Can you suggest a portable drive that has worked well for you,....again, I'm looking at portability and 500 to 640 GB.

Thank you all.........

 

[DewGuy1999]

I've heard and read good things about both Western Digital Passport and Seagate FreeAgent Go drives. Since both Western Digital and Seagate make hard drives, the actual drives in these enclosures are made by them, so you know what your getting. Many of the other brands of external hard drives, both desktop and portable are really just enclosures in many cases with a mystery hard drive inside (unknown brand). Western Digital and Seagate both have some of the longest warranties in the business, so I think either of these two would serve you well. Like mentioned in the thread above if it's a Mac specific drive it will be formatted for Mac and ready to go right out of the box, if it's not Mac specific it can still be used with a Mac, but will just need to be erased and formatted first.

 

[mscriv]

I've always bought Seagate and Lacie external drives. I've never bought a portable drive so I can't speak directly to their quality, but my 3.5" externals that I have bought from these companies have been great.

 

[brecskel]

What i use

I use a Toshiba - 320GB External USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive - White/Black
for work. I work for a state gov and go from office to office doing updates installing software and making repairs. I like it because the department i work for made the switch toe mac and many of the offices i go to use mainly dell machines. I can hook this up to my mac book and pull what i need and then hook it up to the dell machines and make the repairs, upgrades/ installs that i need. I liked it so much i picked up a Toshiba - 500GB External USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive - Liquid Blue. And works great I store all kinda of movies music, back up all my Adobe illustrator, photoshop and dreamwever and Flash files with it. Got them both at bestbuy

 

[Niiro13]

WD is one of the more common external hard drives next to Seagate's FreeAngent.

G-technology is more expensive compared to WD because of the ports they have (daisy chaining as well as eSata), the enclosures themselves (pretty heavy metal), the cooling system, etc. It's more for above average common user.

WD and Seagate's are both good as I have had a couple WDs and a couple of Seagate's. When you wipe them of all their software, really there's not too much difference. Then it comes to whichever company you think is better, offers better warranty, quieter, faster, etc.