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Suggestion on external portable drive

/dev/toaster

/dev/toaster

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Feb 23, 2006
2,478
249
San Francisco, CA
I am looking for a nice portable external drive for my macbook pro. I need something bigger then 80gb or so. I would like a drive that doesn't require an external power source. So, I guess firewire might be out of the question.

It must work in both mac and windows. For the time being, we are recording our podcast on a windows machine since the Alesis firewire mixer doesn't work on mac intel.

Anyway, I am doing the post production on the mac and I wanted to have some extra space for MP3s movies and what not.

Anyone have some recomendations ?
 
i love my 60gb lacie skwarim. it's tiny, light, not very fast but fast enough for what i need. probably not what you're looking for.
anyway, http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10199

edit: i bought it because i needed maximum portability. if you're buying a drive to work with that also needs to be portable, this probably isn't for you (4200rpm 1.8" drive)
 
I am staying away from lacie. We had quite a bit of trouble with their drives at work. We have returned about 6 of them in the past 2 months.

That WD drive looks pretty nice, I think I am gonna grab that one.

Thanks
 
the smartdisk firelite drives...are...amazing

good drives inside (hitachi or toshiba i think) shock mounted, magnesium casing...YOU CANT go wrong with them...ive dropped them so many times and i have like 6 of them around. one fell down the stairs once even out of my photo case. plus they are daisy chainable and bus powered...nothin better than that! has two fw ports on the back so you plug in the drive, then you could plug another thing into the back of the drive...no port taken up !
 
What about using an eSATA adapter in the ExpressCard/34 slot?

I ran across an adapter that was recently (or to-be?) released in another thread.

Would give you MUCH faster transfer times. Basically the same as an internal HDD.
 
I ended up buying the Western Digital 120GB. I really like it. Its very small, very light and has a ruber bottom. Its powered off USB2.

I picked it up at best buy, mostly because I didn't want to wait a few days on shipping and overnight is generally too much.

As far as speed, it works well. I was doing post production on our show last night and it worked find. I did a test record on it and it was perfect access time.

I put BF2 on it, and it slowed down a bit. However, BF2 loads slow as hell anyway, so the extra 5 seconds isn't that bad. (Loading maps takes like 45 seconds)

It also worked perfectly in Windows, doesn't require any drivers.
 
/dev/toaster said:
I would like a drive that doesn't require an external power source. So, I guess firewire might be out of the question.
Click to expand...

i think you got that backwards. fw puts out more power then usb. though usb can still power a 2.5" drive, i have never in my life heard of a 2.5" fw drive that required a power adapter; for this, your going to want to look for a fw drive.

normally, i would reccomend a lacie, but since you want to avoid them, maybe you should take a look at these: http://www.g-technology.com/Products/Products.cfm

they have a nice selection of mini drives, including fw400/usb2 combo drives, and fw800 drives. they even have a 160GB option, but it's a bit pricey. :eek:

EDIT: ok, nevermind, i just noticed you already bought one :eek:
 
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