Hard drive recommendation

I have a 27' iMac (Late 2009) 2.8 Ghz i7 running Lion 10.7.4 with 1 TB hard drive.
I am running out of hard drive space mostly because of movies and music I have on iTunes.  I am wanting to put all my iTunes media on an external hard drive to free up space.  I also have an Apple TV gen 3 (square hockey puck) which I stream my movies and music to my TV.
Could anyone recommend an external hard drive to purchase that will properly work with Lion, eventually Mountain Lion, to store store my iTunes on and will still work with the Apple TV.

Buy a good hard drive or two plus an enclosure to put them into. If you want to provide for growth buy four drives all the same plus a 4 drive enclosure that supports RAID setups. Visit OWC for some possibilities.
Do not buy so-called "green" drives like the Western Digital Blue series. My personal preferences would be for Seagate or Samsung for large capacity drives.
You should look for an enclosure that can support both striped and mirrored RAID arrays. That way you can create two striped arrays for storage space, then mirror the two striped arrays for redundancy/backup.

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    Welcome to Apple Discussions!
    Personally, I like Western Digital and Seagate drives. And I would recommend looking for a larger drive, as prices have really come down and you can often find sales. There is almost no such thing as a hard drive that is too big. I believe the extra space will help with the bigger files because it will improve the chances of larger blocks of space to receive the data.
    Newegg and OWC are good sources. Also look at office supply stores for sales.
    Good luck!

  • External Firewire Hard Drive Recommendation

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  • External hard drive recommendations for OSX 10.4.7 and Windows XP

    I just purchased an iMac20. I used bootcamp and have Windows XP running on a partition. I want to purchase an external hard drive for backup. Recommendations for an easy to use device that will allow backup of both operating systems without too much confusion. Thanks.

    If you have 250GB drive, look for FW400 w/ 320GB.
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  • Hard drive recommendations needed

    I have this: Power Mac G5 (2004)
    http://support.apple.com/kb/SP80
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    See here:
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1834225&tstart=0
    Check out Drive Upgrade DB which is searchable:
    http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/
    I'd go with WD, I have a dozen or so. I usually replace and use 2 yr old drives for backup and redundancy.
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    I bought a retina Mbp yesterday. I bought the 8 RAM. It is the middle model. I couldn't afford the top model with more RAM and bigger hard drive. I have been told that in the future, I will probably need an external hard drive. Any recommendations on external hard drives?

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  • External Firewire Hard Drive Recommendations for novice

    I would like to buy a external hard drive so that I can create a bootable clone, back up files and store pictures on. I am intimidated by reading the threads here on the various problems. Could some suggest "Hard Drives 101" or a simple to use hard drive for me?
    Thanks in advance.

    You cannot go wrong with an external FireWire drive from Other World Computing. I recommend something in the Mercury Elite line, as these are known to work well with Macs. These come in different configuations (e.g. FW 800, FW 400, USB 2.0, and combinations thereof). Unless you have a FW 800 port on your Mac, there is no reason to get this option. FW 400 and USB 2.0 should suffice. I recommend buying a drive with at least as large as your Mac's hard disk, though you may with for more space (e.g. to make a bootable clone, and have room left over for other back ups).
    There are other decent manufacturers, as well. I have read some good things about LaCie in these discussion forums, so you may wish to shop around.

  • Replacement Hard drive recommendations for iMac G5

    I need to replace my hard drive on my old iMac computer and I wanted to know if anybody has a recommendation for an inexpensive replacement unit. I don't need too much memory space, probably anywhere from 500 G to 1 T would be plenty

    Hitachi, WD Caviar, or any drive from [macsales.com] will be good. But remember that you get what you pay for. Look at [xlr8yourmc.com] and see what people there are installing.
    Good luck,

  • External Hard Drive Recommendation for iMac 24

    I'm a Mac Newbie; 25 plus years using HP's. I'm needing advise on best external HD for Time Machine and media storage. I currently have a MacBook 13" and an iMac 24 (3.06 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 1.0 TB Internal Hard Drive). I've noticed a lot of positive comments about OWC external drives, especially the Mercury Elite Series. Is there a particular model or size in that series that would make sense based on my current equipment? Also, just curious, there doesn't appear to be many recommendations for Apple Time Machine units; why not? Thanks in advance for your time into my query.

    I'm very happy with my OWC Mercury Elite Pro. How large a unit you get it mostly a matter of your budget and how much data you want/need to back up. A 1TB external drive would probably do most people quite nicely for a long time, but if you're going to be accumulating a lot of video material, that will fill up space fast, so you might need a larger drive or RAID. OWC has RAID units up to 4TB.
    just curious, there doesn't appear to be many recommendations for Apple Time Machine units; why not?
    Do you mean Apple's Time Capsule? If so, many people are quite happy with it, but since it's more than just an external hard drive, you won't see it mentioned very often when someone asks for a recommendation for an external drive. If you need to share a drive between more than one system, and particularly if you're also in the market for a wireless base station, a Time Capsule might be just the thing for you. If all you need is an external drive for a single computer, a Time Capsule would be overkill.

  • Hard Drives Recommendation's

    Does anyone have a good recommendation for a 200gb, 7200rpm hard drive for the macbook?

    I just installed a hitachi travelstar. available from www.macsales.com
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  • RE: Memory Upgrade Confusion and Second Hard Drive Recommendations ?

    Hi,
    Afraid I'm a bit confused with what would compatible and what wouldn't and was hoping I might get some advice. I want to increase memory by about a GB on my Power Mac G5 (spec. copied below purchased UK early 2006). I understand that once you have the right cards (two installed in parallel) that its quite straight forward. I searched the apple site and the cheapest it gave me for my model for 1 Gb was:
    Apple Memory Module - 1GB DDR2 533MHz Non ECC - 2x512MB DIMMs
    at £140
    http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/91234046/wo/hn5g4hFDfgHw3aTb YlYSoSb9duX/3.0.28.9.5.9
    Then Micro Ankiva quote this and I assume here I would need four of them to get the 1 GB. Also though not sure if this would be compatible ?
    Apple 256MB PC3200 DDR400 DIMM Desktop Memory 184Pin
    £25 x 4 so £100
    http://www.microanvika.com/product.asp?PNO=MAC57117
    Then finally I came across these guys at Mac:Upgrades offering this which again I assume I would need 2 of them (they said these are compatible but I'm dubious because they are so much cheaper?)
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    Here is my spec.
    Machine Name: Power Mac G5
    Machine Model: PowerMac11,2
    CPU Type: PowerPC G5 (1.0)
    Number Of CPUs: 2
    CPU Speed: 2 GHz
    L2 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
    Memory: 512 MB (2x 256 MB DDR2 SDRAM PC2-4200U-444 OK)
    Bus Speed: 1 GHz
    Boot ROM Version: 5.2.7f1
    Serial Number: CK6100AVV5V
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    Finally while I'm here I figured I may as well ask for recommendations from people with regards reliable second internal hard drives. Ideally I'd like to go for 500GB - I currently have 160 GB. Would this be possible with what I have - I read (though not sure correctly) that maybe only 500 Gb in total is possible. Anyway any pointers on this too gratefully received.
    Thanks
    Phil

    Hi MrJax
    Couldn't find your machine via the serial number on apple support pages. Is it a DDR2 G5? 8 slots - max 16gig ram - PCI-X? If so its the same as mine and I'm just looking to upgrade my ram after having some shoddy old dimms die on me! Many thanks to the reseller that did me on that one!!!
    RAM can be a real conundrum, clock speeds and CL's...very confusing. Keep an eye on my post as well as I'm researching what to install as well. Keep in mind whatever you have in there will affect the speed of new RAm you add, so adding faster RAM than what's already there its pretty pointless.
    In the past I've always gone with Crucial RAM. I've installed it on several machines over the years and its always been very reliable.
    I've just moved abroad and so can't buy Crucial here so will be going for Kingston this time round, just not sure which exact dimm type yet.
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    As for HD's. My advice is to go for a Western Digital drive. If you're in the UK then hit ebuyer.com Great prices.
    Hope that helps.

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