What kind of external hd is good for my imac?

J

jlyanks85

macrumors 6502a
I'm looking to buy one down the road, to backup my stuff, just in case. Looking at something that isn't overly expensive.

If the time capsule wasn't 300 dollars I would get that.
 
I'm assuming you have a newesh iMac. You have a lot of choices for backup. I would recommend that whatever you get, get something that can connect to FW800. It will backup soooooo much quicker than USB.

This is what I use:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW924AL1K/

I bought a 2TB drive to put into that enclosure. I like it because I can purchase the size and quality of the drive I want to go into my enclosure.

Don't wait too long on funding your backup solution. Over the years having a backup has saved me a lot of grief when **** happens.
 
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I own western digital drives which I usually buy either from amazon or newegg. Another good drive vendor is seagate. What you want for backup is a drive that is bigger than the drive in your iMac. This will allow time machine to save backups going back a number of months. That is good if you lose something and four months later you realize you need it. You can go into time machine. Dial back 4 or 5 months and retrieve it.
 
Ok, here is the hard drive that I've put into my enclosures (I have 2 of these) One I use for backup and the other I use to hold my movie collection (I have a 13" mbp with a 500GB drive in it. This is a green drive which means it uses less power than regular drives, but it spins down more often. Good if you only use it for backup like I do but if you need extreme speed pick another kind of drive.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...XK0I/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1291509867&sr=8-3

You don't have to buy from amazon but it will give you a good idea of what your choices are and what is a fair price. I find that Amazon and Newegg are far cheaper than going to Best Buy as far as price is concerned.
 
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jlyanks85 said:
I have a 1tb hd in my imac right now. So get a external hd bigger than that size?
Click to expand...

Get a bigger capacity. I'd recommend a 2TB drive and and enclosure to put it in. We are talking 3.5" drives and enclosures. Trust me when I say buy an enclosure that can do FW800. I can backup 450 GBytes of data in about 3 hours using the FW800 drive and enclosure I have. If I use USB2.0 it will take about 13 hours to do the same amount of work.

I must be slipping... I just realized in my previous posts I was talking 2 GBytes... I meant 2 TBytes, which are pretty much the current state of the art at a decent price. 2 GBytes was a big deal 10 years ago...
 
Does a firewire cable come with the enclosure or do you have to buy it separately? Haven't seen many stores sell firewire cables anymore.
 
jlyanks85 said:
Does a firewire cable come with the enclosure or do you have to buy it separately? Haven't seen many stores sell firewire cables anymore.
Click to expand...

The enclosure I pointed you to comes with a FW800 cable and 3 more cables: USB2.0, FW400 and eSata. One cable for each type of port on the enclosure.
 
Oh ok, didn't even see that on the website. I think I'm going to go for this when I'm ready to buy a external hd. Thanks for the help
 
jlyanks85 said:
I'm looking to buy one down the road, to backup my stuff, just in case. Looking at something that isn't overly expensive.

If the time capsule wasn't 300 dollars I would get that.
Click to expand...

Whatever you do, don't buy the Seagate MAC hard drive. I had that thing, and it would constantly go to sleep and never wake up. I'd have to unplug it and plug it back in, it was a real pain.

It's a known problem, that supposedly has a fix, but I could never get it to work.
 
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"I'm looking to buy one down the road, to backup my stuff, just in case. Looking at something that isn't overly expensive.
If the time capsule wasn't 300 dollars I would get that."

Don't waste your money on a Time Capsule, they're not worth it and have a record of failures.

Here's a low-cost solution that will get you going quickly and cheaply:

Get one of these (various items shown):
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
I've seen USB/SATA docks go for under $15 by watching dealmac.com.

The one I use is:
http://www.amazon.com/Syba-Connecla...?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1253062702&sr=1-22

Then, pick up a "bare drive" of your choice from the vendor of your choice.

Again, dealmac.com is a good place to keep an eye on sales.

Download CarbonCopyCloner from here:
http://www.bombich.com/

You can use CCC to "dupe" your internal drive to the external. This will create a bootable clone, as close to an exact copy of your internal as you can get. You can also use CCC to do "incremental" backups so that the backup drive is maintained in the same state as is the internal.

The best thing about having a USA/SATA dock around is that you can put another drive into it whenever you want, etc. Very flexible and very useful.
 
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