Best, cheapest external drive for ibook?

HELLO
I am running out of space on my ibook... 99 % of that being photos and music... can anyone recommend an awesome and inexpensive external hard drive?? thanks!!!
meg

When I was shopping for an external hard drive a year ago at this time, I was advised by two venerable posters not to buy one that doesn't have a 5-year warranty. That's kind of a hard thing to come by, and you probably will have to buy an internal hard drive and an external FireWire enclosure separately and assemble it. It's a pretty easy thing to do, and it's usually a bit cheaper than buying one already assembled.
5-year warranties are even harder to find this year, but I did find this one at a pretty good price:
http://www.xpcgear.com/seag250gbat72.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148141
Any pre-assembled Seagate drives that I can find only have a one-year warranty on them (such as this one at Amazon.com).
It may well be worth it for that extra warranty to buy the pieces and assemble it yourself.
I ended up buying a Maxtor drive with a five-year warranty and a Rosewill case. If you decide to do that, be sure to get the FireWire enclosure.
Good luck.

Similar Messages

G4 as external drive for iBook

Hi
I have my old and trusted G4 tower and would like to set it us as the external drive for my iBook, so that I can store on the G4 all my iphotos and itune libraries as well as backups, and do without the monitor and keyboard.
(the laptop then ideally connected to the stereo....)
i like to come home, plug in the laptop and access the G4 via the laptop...
how do I do that? i got firewire lead which I used to transfer files but I still need a keyboard to access the G4 when I do that.
hope this makes sense. it's clear in my head what I want to do, but not sure I can explain properly...
many thanks
Resi

I think you might be better off either buying an external HD, or just buying an external enclosure and putting the HD from the Tower into that. As far as I know, there is no way to boot the G4 into "Target Mode" without a keyboard.

Best portable external drive for mac laptops

Any suggestions about the best portable hard drive for my mac lap;top.

There is no "best." Everyone has their favorite manufacturer.
My suggestion to you is to do research for the HD that you are interested in. Read its reviews.

External Drive for ibook on 10.4.11

I bought an external drive and it won't mount on the desktop. It's a touch Backup casing with an ATA drive. The seller tells me that other Mac users have said it does work. My understanding is if it doesn't mount, it is not going to work. Is that right? Or is there something else I should do?
Thanks

Go to your Utilities folder, fire up Disk Utility and see if it shows up as a device. If it is brand new and never been formatted it will not show up on your Desktop, but DU will see it. Then you can format it as an HFS+ drive. If DU doesn't see it, the drive is dead.

What are the best affordable external drive options for my iMac ?

Hello,
I am a fairly recent newcomer to Macintosh as my primary personal computing platform. I have recently installed Adobe CS4 Design Premium Student Edition on a late 2006 20in iMac and have several important questions about external hard drives. First of all, everyone knows that using any personal computer (whether you its a Macintosh, or a PC running Windows and/or Linux) without an acceptable way to backup critical data is no different than driving in your car without your seat belt fastened. I need advice for a good external hard disk solution for backup and several other important computing tasks given the following realities
1. Contrary to what I to originally thought, I do not have Firewire 800, but instead have access to dual firewire 400 ports in addition to USB 2.0. My concern over connection speed in regards to Adobe's recommendation to use RAID 0 arrays for scratch disks used by Photoshop CS4. Adobe also recommends that scratch disks for photoshop CS4 are assigned on a hard disk that is not your startup disk. Nontheless, Adobe has no objection to use your startup disk assuming it has plently of Free space (and mine does w/ 189.53 GB available)
2. Do really need RAID 0 to achieve the performance I would need? I had prior Mac based training with Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Indesign, in High school. I have not used this software in 4 years and am not only trying to refresh my skills but to learn the software. In other words I am still in the beginner stage With practice and patience, I will certainly learn the software and use it to the best of my creative energies. Given the situation if my work becomes complex enough over time how important is RAID 0 when I make purchase of an external hard disk? I known that the disk utility in Mac OS X allows the user to create a Raid array. This seems like the cheapest way to accomplish the job. However, the purchase of an external Hard Drive must be able to safely backup my system and also provide adequate performance.
3. Speaking of backup, I am one of those users who is still stubbornly clinging to Mac OS X Tiger. However, updating to a new OS has been required ritual for my previous two PCs. That said given that Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard will be out in mere months, I do not see the wisdom now in upgrading to Leopard. After all as a higher education student, money is tight and see Snow Leopard as far more compelling and future-proof upgrade. Snow Leopard is getting better plumbing and will also include Microsoft Exchange Server support (possibly the biggest selling point). I also have interest in using Boot Camp in 10.6 (or 10.5) for running windows software (that are useful for my academics) and games (particularly Half-Life 2 and other Steam games that can run well within my Mac's fairly limited gaming capabilities. If I decide to use Boot Camp I have to partition my internal hard disk. This further complicates finding a very reasonable, affordable, and reliable external disk solution given everything that I have mentioned. Any help is highly appreciated.
Thanks.

I don't think you should worry about the RAID stuff. The only way you could create a RAID is by using external drives, or one those external enclosures with two drives inside. Any speed advantage of such a RAID would be mostly negated by the FireWire 400 connection.
Use your internal drive space for speed critical functions. Use a FireWire 400 external drive for additional storage space, where speed is important but not critical, such as storing your existing media (including your things like your iTunes library files). Use a separate cheaper USB 2.0 external drive for your Time Machine (or whatever method) backup archive, where speed is not that important at all (some people even use a network connection for their Time Machine backup).
You can get a FireWire 800 drive and use an adapter to connect to FireWire 400. The connection won't be any faster on your iMac, but you can use the drive later with a Mac that does have FireWire 800. There are drives that have FireWire 400 and 800, and USB 2.0.
I like the drives sold by OWC
http://www.macsales.com/
I often buy the drive enclosure empty and find a good deal on the hard drive mechanism that I want. OWC sells most of their drives empty. My current Time Machine drive is actually one of these USB adapters
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/U2NV2SPATA/
connected to a Western Digital 750GB SATA drive that I got for about $70. Found that deal through dealmac.com. Couldn't think of a cheaper way to add that large amount of backup space, and it works very well. The internal drive in my iMac is only 160GB, so most of my personal data is on an external FireWire 400 drive; both drives are backed up by Time Machine.

I would like to know if you have to back up a macbook hard drive, can I use a external hard drive that has been previously used to back up several pc 's, or is it best to have a separate external drive for the Mac?

I would like to know if you have to back up a macbook hard drive, can I use a external hard drive that has been previously used to back up several pc 's, or is it best to have a separate external drive for the Mac?

In the Mac side of things, backups usually come in two flavors: clones or incrementals.
A bootable clone is a bit-for-bit copy of all essential files in the startup volume. If using the Lions, clones can be made using CarbonCopyCloner or just plain old Disk Utility. These backups represent the safest protection of your info, but take the longest to do. Recovery is an inverse process: you copy the clone back into the internal drive.
Incremental backups start with a complete backup of the startup volume and only copy whatever changed from the previous run. OS X includes the fully integrated Time Machine backup utility to do this. It is extremely easy to do and takes the least amount of time. Recovery is another matter altogether since you have to start with a freshly installed instance of the OS and have to apply all intervening backups to bring the result to the latest saved version.
As for where the backup takes place, the recommended media is an external dedicated drive or drives connected via the fastest interface available on your Mac: Thunderbolt, USB3, Firewire, or USB2. Network-based backups, wired or wireless, are attractive but may not offer the same performance and hence take longer. Also important to note that the entire drive need not be completely dedicated to a single backup. The Mac's EFI firmware infrastructure allows for an unlimited number of partitions on a hard drive and each can be used for either type of backups.
Holler if you need specifics on how to do each. This was just an executive summary.

What is the best way to set up an external drive for video storage

What is the best way to set up an external drive for video storage?

Check the formatting. It need to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled). This is also known as HFS+.
FAT32 and NTFS formatting will not work with iMovie.
If necessary, you can reformat using Disk Utility.
Make one large partition. No need for multiple partitions.
Do moves or copies to the external drive through iMovie as detailed in iMovie Help. If you move Events in the Finder, they may become unlinked from the projects that use them.

Can I make an iBook hard drive into an external drive for a MacBook?

Hi,
After 5 years my beloved G3 iBook has died. The diagnosis is a failed logic board. I am purchasing a MacBook, assuming the iBook drive is still OK; can I extract it from the iBook and build it into a suitable case so it becomes an external drive for my new computer? Will I have worry about any software clashes between the two drives.
As always your advice will be treasured,
Thanks
Dick Tanner
iBook, dual USB, 14.1in, 800Mh Mac OS X (10.3.9) Now dead, failed logic board.

...can I extract it from the iBook and build it into a suitable case so it becomes an external drive for my new computer?
Yes you can do that.
Will I have worry about any software clashes between the two drives.
No, it will just be an external drive like any other.

How to best partition an external drive for my purposes?

Hello, please help,
I've just bought a Western Digital 'My Passport' 320Gb USB (no firewire) portable external harddrive for backing up my data prior to iMac repair.
I also plan to totally wipe my PPC iMac and reinstall it with Leopard.
I erased the external HD, zeroing out the data from it's previous owner, and reformatted it as Mac OS Extended (not journaled).
Now I realise that it might be even more useful than I'd imagined.
I'd now like to partition it so I can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of my entire iMac while using the rest of the drive as a separate partition for just backing up data.
Ideally I want to be able to use the drive on both Intel and PPC Macs and even PCs, is this possible? How should I format the drive to achieve this?
I've heard I should format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) HFS+, what ever that is
I'm currently running OS 10.4.11 but plan to buy Leopard and install that after the wipe.

17" 1.9Ghz iMac G5 (iSight)
I've just bought a Western Digital 'My Passport' 320Gb USB (no firewire)
I'd now like to partition it so I can use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable copy of my entire iMac while using the rest of the drive as a separate partition for just backing up data.
Ideally I want to be able to use the drive on both Intel and PPC Macs and even PCs, is this possible? How should I format the drive to achieve this?
For what you want to do, there is a mismatch between your PPC computer and the external drive that you bought.
With a few exceptions, a PPC Mac requires a firewire external drive for booting and will not boot from a USB drive, regardless of which OS is installed and regardless of the partition scheme and volume format on the drive. I also have an iMac G5, and mine will not boot from USB.
If you do exchange your drive for a firewire drive, do not get another Western Digital model to use with your G5 - many external WD firewire drives will not boot a PPC mac. See [this page|http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?pfaqid=1787]
If you want to keep your present USB drive, you can still partition it with one partition for a backup clone and another for "other stuff". With respect to immediate use for recovering your stuff after a clean Leopard install on the HD, I think that Migration Assistant will still work, though I haven't tried this. As for the future, the problems with a clone not being bootable are 1) You can't test it to see if it works OK, and 2) If you do need to restore from it you'd need to boot from "somewhere else" - I think you could boot from an install disk and use Disk Utility's Restore feature to clone it back.
With regard to PC access, a PPC mac normally requires an Apple Partition Map partition scheme on the drive for booting, and such a scheme does not allow for the FAT32 volume format that is readable by PCs. However in this case since your PPC mac can't boot from it anyway, you could partition the drive as GUID. This would allow the main volume to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the nonbootable clone, and would allow the extra volume to be formatted as FAT32. If you eventually got an Intel Mac, a clone from it to the main volume would also then be bootable.
But what I would do, if feasible, is exchange the USB drive and get a non-WD firewire drive instead.
Message was edited by: jsd2

Using an External Drive for Time Machine and Other Things

I have a 2TB external drive which I use for Time Machine Backups on my 2 macs. The macs have HDs of 500GB and 160GB so the external drive has ample space for backups.
Is it okay to use the external drive for other things that I don't care if they aren't backed up (like digital copies of DVDs)? i.e. Will Time Machine cause any issues if a drive is used for more than just Time Machine backups?

rgraves wrote:
I have a 2TB external drive which I use for Time Machine Backups on my 2 macs. The macs have HDs of 500GB and 160GB so the external drive has ample space for backups.
Maybe. See #1 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Is it okay to use the external drive for other things that I don't care if they aren't backed up (like digital copies of DVDs)? i.e. Will Time Machine cause any issues if a drive is used for more than just Time Machine backups?
It's best to put such things in their own partition. See #3 in the FAQ.
You may also want to make separate partitions for each Mac's backups, if you're backing-up either one directly (ie, not over your network). See #4 in the FAQ.

I'm having a problem with using an external drive for my iTunes media

I recently switched to using an external drive for my iTunes library and I was able to switch everything fine. I was able to get iTunes to download and new TV shows, videos, and music that I purchased from the iTunes store to the iTunes folder on my external drive but I can't get it to do the same for applications. All my applications are still being used through the iTunes folder on my internal drive and new ones that I download get put in that folder too. How can I set it to get iTunes to put new applications and use the existing application files from my external drive?

There is a Windows based utility that will allow one to change the location of the 'My Music' folder, but you appear to be running a Mac.
You may find more appropriate help in the iTunes for Mac Discussions.
If you are running Windows, post back and some info can be provided.
Best of Luck

Going from xp to windows 7 64 bit using an external drive for music storage

Greetings Techies!
I hope you all are well.
I need to move my iTunes from an XP machine to Windows 7 64 bit. On the XP machine I am using an external drive for music storage and the iTunes database is stored on the internal drive. I am looking for advice on how to transfer all of this over to my new Windows 7 64 bit machine. I know iTunes can be picky about everything and I don’t want to take and chances and loose my playlists or music.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Blessings,
paul

You are right about it being picky. I just upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 and was forced to format my drive. I had all the music backed up, but when I imported it, I have 2 or 3 copies of some songs, art work missing, and have lost my playlists. I hope someone responds to your question, because I could use similar help! Best of luck to ya . . .

Can anyone recommend a good 2TB external drive for my iMac 10.9 ?

can anyone recommend a good 2TB external drive for my iMac 10.9 ?

The Griffin Survivor is a military-grade case that I use. It's $40 and I purchased it at Best Buy. It has a rubber piece that covers the charging port, but can be easily removed for charging while still in the case. The only downside of the case is because of the added girth, it makes the iPod unusable with iHomes or other docks unless you take it out of the case.

Which external drive for backups?

My brand new 21.5" iMac is on its way here today, and I've been told to buy an external drive for backups. Which I think is a great idea. However, my head's starting to hurt from all the info I'm reading here on the forum about WHICH one, Firewire cables, etc etc. The Rocstor 500GB has been recommended to me personally, but I've read about Lacie and a few other brands. I'm thinking it'd be best to get a 1T size. But WHICH HARD DRIVE SHOULD I GET? I don't wanna spend a lot of bucks!!!
Plus I have a Firewire cable but how do I know if it's a 2 or a 4? I bought it when I migrated data from my Silver edition iMac to my G4 iMac back in 2004 or 2005.
Thanks!

Congratulations Sheryl on the new iMac.
I recently replaced a G-4 tower with an iMac. The G-4 had a port for Firewire 400. The iMac came equipped with one Firewire 800 port a firewire cable and 4USB ports. I suspect that also applies to your new machine. In order to transfer files from one machine to the other using Firewire 400/800 I had to buy an adapter from the Apple store. Your help menu will explain how to set up the iMac as a target for the transfer.
As to backup: I use Super Duper and over 8 years had backed up religiously to a Lacie external HD. About the time I needed to use it as a file transfer source to the iMac it quit.
After much study and considering how Time Machine can eat up space I settled on the external hard drives described below - all were partitioned. The Drobo uses firewire 800 and 4 multiple internal hard drives. It is the place where time machine is backed up. The setup was about $600.
The two lacie hard drives are USB 2.0 driven.
I have learned the hard way that it pays to backup the backups.
If I could only have one external hard drive and with all things considered I would opt for the 1TB Lacie Stark (about $125) that is USB driven.
Sure hope this helps a bit. To help further we need to know more specifics about your need.
Mcthomas

Formatting external drive for storage/backup/video files

Hi,
I just purchased a 500mb My Book Pro external drive for use with my imac duo which runs Windows XP via bootcamp. This computer is shared by three family with very different skills and needs. My dilemma. I want to format the drive so that the imac can be backed up easily three users. It is formated Fat32 and is supplied with Restrospect Express 7.5 backup software. It would be nice to backup the modestly used windows sector, but that's a secondary consideration. My problem is that one user has a lot of larger than 4 gb video files which are too large the Fat 32 format. My notion is to segment the backup drive so that I leave 300 mb in fat 32 to facilitate backup with supplied software, and segment a second 200 gb drive using mac os extended so that the user can manually move her video files for storage/backup on the backup drive. Is there a simpler solution? For example, if I formatted the entire 500gb as mac os extended, could I still run the retrospect backup software? If not, is there a reasonably priced alternative software? And finally, with either Fat32 or Mac OS extended, can I move files from the Windows platform? Would I be better off just biting the bullet and telling my daughter to make her own arrangements to compress and backup her video files or get her own hard drive, thus leaving the backup drive to the simple factory supplied software solution?
G-4 and iMac core duo Mac OS X (10.4.9) use emacs and imacs at work location

Hi,
I just purchased a 500mb My Book Pro external drive
for use with my imac duo which runs Windows XP via
bootcamp. This computer is shared by three family
with very different skills and needs. My dilemma. I
want to format the drive so that the imac can be
backed up easily three users. It is formated Fat32
and is supplied with Restrospect Express 7.5 backup
software. It would be nice to backup the modestly
used windows sector, but that's a secondary
consideration. My problem is that one user has a lot
of larger than 4 gb video files which are too large
the Fat 32 format. My notion is to segment the backup
drive so that I leave 300 mb in fat 32 to facilitate
backup with supplied software, and segment a second
200 gb drive using mac os extended so that the user
can manually move her video files for storage/backup
on the backup drive. Is there a simpler solution? For
example, if I formatted the entire 500gb as mac os
extended, could I still run the retrospect backup
software? If not, is there a reasonably priced
alternative software? And finally, with either Fat32
or Mac OS extended, can I move files from the Windows
platform? Would I be better off just biting the
bullet and telling my daughter to make her own
arrangements to compress and backup her video files
or get her own hard drive, thus leaving the backup
drive to the simple factory supplied software
solution?
G-4 and iMac
core duo Mac OS X (10.4.9) use emacs
and imacs at work location
Hello,
You're indeed in a pickle. If you use Bootcamp and want the HD accessible via the Mac and WinXP, then you don't want to format it as Mac HFS because WInXP wouldn't be able to access it. If you go FAT32 then both WInXP and Mac OS can access it, but you face the dilemma of the 4GB threshold.
If you format as NTFS, then you eliminate the 4GB threshold but then Mac OS cannot access it.
I have a similar dilemma, which is why i use Parallels more than Bootcamp. I have 2 external FW HD's (160GB/250GB), both formatted to Mac HFS. The 160GB i have partitioned as 50GB and 100GB. I have a bootable backup of Mac OS residing on the 100GB partition (yay to SuperDuper!) and some other stuff on the remaining 50GB. The 250GB is exclusive for movies (cough..cough..bittorrent) and for streaming via Orb 2.0 to my Treo. I have WinXP running in Parallels, and Vista Ultimate via Bootcamp. In Parallels, i can access my external HD's via Parallel's Shared Folders but in Vista (Bootcamp) since the HD's are in a non-Windows recognised formatting, they're not accessible (which is a bummer, as i'm loving Win media center).
What you can do is partition the HD the way you're thinking and format (one part Mac HFS and the other NTFS), but my best recommendation is that with the falling prices of HD's nowadays, why not just get a seperate HD do what you want with it. I spied a WD MyBook 500GB USB HD at CompUSA for $129.99 (no mail-in rebate nonsense) and similar good prices at Bestbuy and Newegg.com.
iMac 17" 2GHZ C2Duo 2GB RAM 160GB HD Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Best, cheapest external drive for ibook?

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