external hard disk recommendations?
 

Looking to pick up a 300-500GB external hard drive to back up my (february updated) 12" Power Book fairly regularly. Fairly new to Macs, and I've heard a few rumors in this area, so I thought I'd see what the forums here had to say on the matter.

I've heard that:
a) Though USB 2.0 is technically faster than the FW on a 12" PB, a poor OS implementation for USB hard disks actually results in slower performance.

b) "Lacie" brand drives like to go boom and eat all your data.

Are either of those statements accurate?

The Apple Store shows a 500GB Lacie drive (FW400/800 only) for $400. Seems like a decent price, but the 12" PB doesn't do FW800, if I recall correctly. I'm going to be copying over 50-100GB of data (full backup) every other day or so, so speed is somewhat of an issue.

A PC World article from November 2004 (http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/artic...,117817,00.asp) ranks the Maxtor OneTouch 300GB as the best buy. So it's also $1/GB, but is USB2.0 and FW400 equipped. Is either brand or interface combo preferable?

a) I'd agree, Firewire on the Mac performs noticeably better than USB 2.0, regardless of what the specs say.

b) LaCie has been a Mac oriented company for many years. They've been great, they've been a beacon of light in the darkness. But lately those HDs and CD-ROM drives...

There are some good generic drives around. Here's one place that's been around a while. I use it for drives and memory.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...-combo-drives/

I would agree that FW is faster on mac for sure. I just got a 120gb external USB2/FW400 drive from Edge Technologies, through newegg.com for about 1$/gb shipped. Seems to be nice so far. Have 2 partitions, an 80 for my mac to be completely backed up, and then the rest is set aside for my application install files storage. That way if I need to kill it all and start from scratch i can.

I bought a case and hard drive from OWC. I wanted a faster hard drive than I could find in any of the pre-built FW hard drives that I looked at. I also didn't have to play for any crappy backup software that I wasn't going to use.

i use an external FW800 case purchased from OWC ... with a Seagate hard drive (5 year warranty!) -- they go up to 400 GB. note that some of the 'all-in-one' external drives only carry a 1 year (or less) warranty (this guided me to buy both pieces separately).

Bought a 120GB LaCie d2 drive (fw400) that is still working fine, year and a half old, has been used for video editing for a month or so, but it just a music/backup drive for my mothers iMac at the minute.

I have a 250GB LaCie d2 drive (fw400) that is about 2 months old now, and that has my hard drive mirrored to it about every couple of days (80GB), plus I play games off it and backup my music to it everyday (40+GB of music!)

LaCie seem to work fine for me (also stuck with fw400 on a 12" :() but if you can get a better deal with a generic drive, go for that I say.

LaCie
 

I have had good experiences with my LaCie drives. I did a lot of research when looking for a drive and I like the fact that the LaCies has always supported Mac. It's also good because I move from country to country, and LaCie (French company) makes external drives that are 100-240v. This is also a plus about buying Apple products, everything they make supports 100-240v, so if you move between Europe-America-Japan etc it's a dream with not needing power convertors. Finally, check out the back ends of those LaCie drives. Many of them have Kensington security lock holes. I'd be worse off if someone stole my hard drives than if they took my PowerBook because of the data I'd lose. The next external I drive will be a LaCie firewire with those security slots. At the moment I have two 250GB LaCie Porsche Firewire drives. Their design is sleek but they lack the security slots. Lock them up with a cable such as this:
http://www.microsaver.com/html/2228.html

My Lacie 500Go external hard drive died after a mere two years, and I'm now shopping for a replacement. Partly because of its 5-year warranty, I'm leaning toward the Seagate Free Agent 500Go desktop, which has only USB interface, no firewire. I'm not concerned about speed; is there another reason to prefer firewire interface?

Thanks for any advice.

Don't even think of using a USB drive if you don't have USB 2.0 on your Mac. Other than that, I've been fortunate to have no problems with USB drives yet.

400Mbps = 2.5 x 480Mbps
 

Regarding USB2 and FireWire400: USB2 is spec'd at 480Mbps, FW400 at 400Mbps.

However, given that USB2 comm protocol is processor intensive, the effective, sustained (non-burst) data xfer rate is much slower than FW400 sustained data xfer rate.

Specific example:
I recently bought a WD10EAC (1TB) drive and installed it into an OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad Interface enclosure. Whenever I buy a new drive, I habitually zero everything prior to the format (not strictly necessary, I know, but a habit nevertheless.)

Using DiskUtility, the status info came back with the estimate that this process would take 10 hours when connected via USB2. After a few minutes, I decided to stop the process, and try other options. I reconnected using the FW400 port (I didn't have a FW800 cable), and started over again.
This time DiskUtility came back with the estimate of 4 hours, and, sure enough, ~4 hrs later when I came back, it was all done.

Yeah, I know, a single anecdotal experience, but it sure convinced me.

Note: All this was done on a 2.4 GHz 17" MBP that was doing nothing else and disconnected from all networks.

Barefeats ( www.barefeats.com ) have a good comparison of FW400 vs USB2 under a variety of tests with OSX. Have a look there and it becomes obvious on a Mac that FW is definitely better.

Stewie

I bought a Western Digital MyBook 500 G drive from Amazon for $159.00 and it's working fine for Time Machine.

Phht. I got a MyBook 500G from Best Buy for $129. It's decent, despite being USB-only and having come with a bad cable. But I had plenty of extras laying around.

Thanks a million for your advice! You have saved me from an annoying mistake. Now to find a non-Lacie firewire-interfaced hard drive in France that will actually last. . .

Apple sells, and semi-privately recommends, the G-Tech enclosure and drive (I'm not certain what drive G-Tech is putting in them right now). It isn't the cheapest choice, but I think it has many strong points and strong probabilities of compatibility. Since you can buy it from Apple, I don't think availability would be a problem.

Joe VanZandt

That's odd--mine has firewire and usb and came with both cables.

Another vote here for a G-Technology case: http://g-technology.com/ .

Several of the product pages (I'm not sure if all of them do, though) mention specifically that they use Hitachi drives. This is the brand of drive I would probably install in one anyway (either Hitachi or Seagate).

Trevor

Ahh, that's why you paid more. You didn't get the bottom-of-the-line "Essentials" version. I couldn't see spending $30-40 extra on Firewire when I was going to end up accessing the drive as a shared volume over WiFi most of the time anyway.

stay away from myBook
 

Just bought a myBook premium 500GB from Costco a few months back and now I can't access any of my information! Heard the same from a colleague who bought 5 WD drives from Circuit City.

DON'T get a AcomData drive!!! They never work on Macs and if you want to use it on Windows it almost never connects so you have to unplug and replug it in to the USB tons of times before it actually connects. And when you call or email them they never reply. Terrible support

Any more external drive suggestions? Specifically something compact and reliable.

I use a Lacie Porsche portable 250GB firewire 400 drive. So far no problems. I use mine for a bootable clone of my internal hard drive, using CCC to clone.

I bought a Buffalo 300 GB Firewire/USB for $130 or so (in the US). It's been fine.

For a couple years now I've been using a Maxtor 300GB firewire 400 external drive. Knock on wood, it's been holding up well. I keep it locked up in a safe with my camera gear, firearms, etc. It's not technically a 'portable' but it's small, light, and I've brought it a couple places.

As I've only got about 60GB left available in it, I'm thinking of going the RAID route. Getting into video has really eaten up the space, as my primary machine is a G4 mini which came with only a 40GB HD. But, as I'm paranoid about losing all my data with breaking and entering, I'll probably just get another external firewire, to be able to keep it in the safe.

Although I hate LaCie for their lack of support (read not existing) I still like their products.

I have had good experiences with the Porsche drives but I wouldn't use them if you intend to put your drive to heavy use since they don't have fans.

That's why I just recently got two of their Quadra drives and must say that I really like them. They have quiet fans and quiet disks (Seagate). I made a mirrored Raid of them and the speed is amazing. They have FireWire 400 / 800, eSATA, and USB interfaces.

They were only a little more expensive than the Porsche drives.