Recommend a hard-drive

[joebrown84]

Hello all,

I want an external hard-drive to move my massive amount iTunes files over to. It's taking up so much space on my iMac to the point that I'm being told by my all-knowing machine that I need to free up 3.2GB before I can update software.

I'm in the market for something of a minimum size of 1TB, preferably no more than £150, £180. Yes, I'm British.

All help and advice gratefully received.

Cheers.

 

[firestarter]

If you want something that looks good and Mac-ish, then G-Tech drives are really good.

LaCie look pretty, but you read lots of stories about problems - personally I've had some die on me.

At the lower end, I quite like the Western Digital 'green' drives - plastic but much cheaper.

You can of course build your own. A 2TB drive costs less than £60 and a nice aluminium case can be had for just over £20. The mechanism just screws in - a 2 minute job.

Now is a good time to think about backups too. Consider getting at least two drives so you can take a copy of your files.

 

[joebrown84]

Great, thanks for your quick response.

I quite like the look of the Western Digital hard drive, it has the Apple TV look (another purchase I'm considering making). Have you any idea on transfer speeds between the drive and iMac?

Sorry to be a pain, this is a bit of a new area for me.

 

[firestarter]

If it's USB2 it won't be that fast - 25MB/s maximum. So to transfer 1TB you're looking at around 12 hours.

FW800 is quite a lot faster, but I haven't seen it go much above 65MB/s in real life. That same 1TB would take just over 4 hours.

If you're mainly using it for iTunes, even USB2 will be 'fast enough' most of the time. If you do the initial library transfer over night, you won't notice the 11 hours go. Day to day file copies won't be too painful, and it's definitely fast enough to play HD movies etc. back from.

Edit: For backups, consider getting a drive dock and using bare internal drives. 1TB drive mechanisms are only about £35, so it's really cheap to keep a couple as backups. Just use a drive dock to write it, then keep it safely in a drawer (use the anti static bag it came in).

 

[joebrown84]

Great advice, much appreciated. Thank you for your time.

I think a USB2 will do the job, but I'll definitely consider having backup files in a drawer.

Cheers

 

[joebrown84]

Just ordered this on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0047VOGOO/ref=oss_product

For that price for a 2TB drive I can't really lose.

Thanks again for your advice and time.