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What kind of external hard drive do you use for MBP?

M

Mars2010

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 19, 2010
42
0
I imagine most people have a portable hard drive, rather than an external one that has its own power supply, for their laptop. My iMac has a 1 TB drive specifically for Time Machine, but I was thinking of getting a 320-500 GB portable drive for my MBP. Can I partition part of it for TM and use the rest for storage?

I was looking at the WD Passport drives and also a portable Hitachi one. Anyone have these external drives, and are they compatible with Macs ? Do portables fail more often than external drives that don't get moved around a lot?
 
Mars2010 said:
I imagine most people have a portable hard drive, rather than an external one that has its own power supply, for their laptop.
Click to expand...
Some of us have both bus-powered drives and those requiring a power supply.
Mars2010 said:
ICan I partition part of it for TM and use the rest for storage?
Click to expand...
Yes.
Mars2010 said:
Anyone have these external drives, and are they compatible with Macs ?
Click to expand...
All hard drives are compatible with Macs. It depends on how you choose to format it.
Mars2010 said:
Do portables fail more often than external drives that don't get moved around a lot?
Click to expand...
It depends on the drive and how you handle it.

Any external hard drive will work with PCs or Macs, as long as the connectors are there (Firewire, USB, etc.) It doesn't matter how the drive is formatted out of the box, since you can re-format any way you like. Formatting in HFS (Mac OS Extended) or FAT32 or NTFS-3G can be done with the Mac OS X Disk Utility.

FAT32
  • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
  • No individual file larger than 4GB.
NTFS
HFS
  • Read/Write HFS from native Mac OS X
  • To Read/Write HFS from Windows, Install MacDrive
  • To Read HFS (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer

Searching the forum with MRoogle will usually find answers to most of your questions:

Mac Guide on External Hard Drives

[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/904281/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/899614/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/883573/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/875630/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/861006/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/824809/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/849529/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/847438/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/834250/[/url]
... and many, many others.
 
I use a WD Passport for Time Machine (which I don't take with me all at) and an LaCie Rugged for other data.
 
I use a large G-technology external drive (the plug-in for power kind) for my editing scratch disk.

then i have a portable iomega (no plug in needed) i use for my time machine
 
Thanks for all the replies, and especially GGJ for the thorough explanation.

I have LaCie and Hitachi externals on my desktops, and WD internals. I haven't had any problems with any except for one internal (WD) failure several years ago. As I read about other peoples' experiences, I guess I've been relatively lucky in that respect. Are there any brand names I should steer clear of in terms of high failure-rate?
 
I dont know from personal experience but I have heard alot of bad reports on the Iomega Drives. Myself I have had good luck with Western Digital and believe Seagate should be another good option.
 
320GB 7200rpm Western Digital Scorpio Black for Time Machine and 2TB G Technology G-RAID(0) for FCS stuff.

The G-RAID is super durable too; I accidentally dropped it twice(on carpet) and it still works like new with the same read/write speeds.
 
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