USB external drive vs. Firewire

Do I understand correctly that I cannot store my movies and edit them in iMovie when they reside on an external drive via USB connection? Is it possible that I can use the USB hard drive as long as I format the drive for Mac (not FAT format)? Or must I use a firewire hard drive? Anyone? Thanks in advance for anyone who knows the 411. -Jeff

I am sorry, it has been a while since I looked into this. I believe it goes something like this...
I hope someone will correct me if I am wrong. Also, if you have a Fat32 drive, plug it in and try it. If it doesn't work it is easy to reformat using disk utility.
NTFS - Good for Windows, but Read Only for Mac, Bootable for Windows
Fat 32 - Works for Both (read/write), not bootable for Mac, 4GB-1 maximum file size, Bootable for Windows
HFS+ - Works for Mac, bootable for Mac, no Windows
The issues with Fat 32 for video applications: 4GB file size limit frequently will not be enough, disk fragmentation can be a big issue for large file sizes.
I haven't been able to find anything saying it absolutely wont work, and I dont have time to test it tonight.
Also, drives have come way down in price. You can get a new firewire drive and format to hfs+ for video applications and keep your current USB drive for sharing.
One more piece of data, I have a firewire drive (HFS+) for my nightly backups with SuperDuper. I bought my daughter an inexpensive USB drive (HFS+) for backups using SuperDuper. The Firewire drive is much faster for the nightly backup, and it is much faster when I boot from it than booting from the USB drive (SuperDuper creates bootable backups).
One last thing, I bought a USB 4GB flashdrive for about $30. It easily handles most of my needs for transferring files to a PC or other Macs.
Sorry to ramble, but that is my brain dump on this subject. Hopefully others will point out my glaring mistakes and omissions.

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Using a usb external drive with logic

I have a 500 GB Lacie usb hard drive which I'm currently using just to backup my system. (Still on Tiger by the way.) I'm in an older intel iMac (1.83. 2 gigs ram, 250 gig internal hard drive). After installing LP 8 and all the bells and whistles on the internal drive I now have less than half of my internal drive space available. My logic project files are there as well. Not a big problem but I'm trying to look further down the road... Usb drives are slower than firewire but my projects are relatively simple. I don't record more than 2 tracks simultaneously and rarely exceed 24 tracks total for a song. Two questions. First can I get by with my usb external drive? And second how do I move my projects onto and external drive and still have logic know where they are? Thanks

I have the oldest macbook (1.83. 2 gigs ram, 60 gig internal hard drive)
I have all my logic content on my external maxtor firewire 400 drive (usb 2.0 is actually faster than firewire 400) and everything is fine. the good thing is if your external drive has 7200rpm, but the ones with 5600rpm should do as well.
Once you drag your apple loops to logic from your external drive, logic will remember for the next visit. And when you are opening a project which is on the external drive , just find it with logic finder and all should be fine.

Imovie9, 13"macbook aluminum and USB external drive

I know firewire is better, but is it totally impossible to use USB. Others have said its ok. Tom Wolsky on the FCE forum said that many people are returning the macbooks without firewire. I did a search on other discussions and some say its ok, while others say no.
Please do i really need a macbook pro or a white macbook. I will be editing HDV and eventually AVCHD.

Thank you! Yes. I have HDV today with an imac. I am deciding between the new macbook and the new white macbook. I really want the small form factor. I should really just buy the white one since it has firewire, but I don't want plastic and i like the new touchpad. I also want to get a flash drive HD camera that uses USB. I got concerned using a USB External drive for the AVCHD because of file sizes and making the USB drive unstable. I think i will ensure that i keep enough hard drive space on the macbook to do all editing and then move as much as I can to the external drive.

USB External drive not showing in Finder, or on Desktop

I have two USB external drives from the same manufacturer. One is for regular storage, the second is for Time Machine and movies.
The first one shows everywhere, on the desktop, in finder and in Disk Utility.
The second drive shows in Disk Utility only. However, it is functioning fine with Time Machine. So it is mounted. I have tried several repairs, and it reports no fault found. So it is certainly functioning correctly, but a setting or error in the operating system is not allowing it to be viewed in finder, or on the desktop.
Any suggestions.

Correction: Title should be Firewire External drive not showing in Finder, or on Desktop.

Advice on usb external drives

let me start by saying i love my new intel imac i bought in march. its doing what i need it to do and much much more.im going to need backup space soon for photos,video clips,audio ect. i was hoping for any advice on what are my best options for usb external drives.
p.s.im waiting till i can back up all my OSX stuff before i install bootcamp
looking foward to playing around with that !
thanks............

My advice is to not bother with USB. Get a USB/FireWire drive instead. It is more flexible - meaning you can use it on older Macs and PCs without USB - without sacrificing the speed and reliablility of FW.
The USB/FW drives do not cost that much more than a plain USB drive. Be sure to get a drive with the Oxford 911 chipset as they are the most stable and reliable chipset out there. Avoid the Prolific chipset.
I like the Mercury Elite Pro drives from OWC. Mine has never let me down and I plan to get another one soon. You can also buy the enclosure and add your own drive. It is very easy to do.
First Gen 20" G5 iMac, upgraded 320GB Western Digital HD, 2GB Patriot RAM, AE/BT Mac OS X (10.4.6) 160 GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro USB/FW drive, Logitech Z-2300 speakers

HD clone on USB external drive - what to do?

Greetings-
My Seagate Go USB external drive has a Carbon Copy Clone image. I purchased the Seagate before learning that only fire wire externals provide bootable clones. The Seagate appears fine as a backup. I am trying to figure out what I'm going to do should the internal HD crash. My eMac was upgraded to 4.11 by a Mac shop but they did not give me system disks - my only copy of 4.11 is in the internal HD.
Is it possible to create some kind of start up disk that would allow me to start the Mac (with a bad HD) and then operate the Mac normally using the Seagate clone? Can the OS be copied from the internal HD onto a DVD and could this then be used as a start up disk?
If no, are there any other options? If no, can you suggest an economical fire wire external drive (125-250GB)?
Thanks in advance,
Rich
Huntington Beach, CA

Hi Rich, Firewire is your best option, there is CloneX that allows you to make a bootable CD/DVD of your drive...
http://www.tri-edre.com/english/clonex.html
But it is limited & painfully slow.
I strongly recommend that you get a good Firewire drive to Clone your Internal drive to ASAP!
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/firewire+drives

MDT 2012 deploy OS from USB external drive failed - need to unplug and plug it once again

We are using MDT 2012 and deploying Windows 7 using media (USB external hard drive). We can successfully deploy Windows 7 32 bit using this method but there is a problem with deploying Windows 7 64bit. This problem appears only on HP EliteBook 840. We can
boot into WinPE 64 bit and can start proper task sequence, all image is applied then after restart, before logon screen appears there is an error saying that cannot find litetouch.vbs script. After clicking ok, I can logon to Windows and there is no usb external
drive recognized. But when I unplug and plug usb drive once again it is recognized by Windows and can be used. I can see that Windows install some drivers just after plug it again
I checked BIOS looking for some USB power options - there is no such settings. And 32 bit deployment works ok. So this is not a case. Looks for me like a problem with proper usb drivers for 64 bit. I download all drivers from HP website (driver pack and
drivers only for USB 3.0). We are using make and model matching in MDT - works ok for all the rest hardware models. Any idea how to troubleshoot it?

Not sure what's going on here. Is this a USB "Flash" drive or a USB "Hard Drive". There *Is* a distinction.
I *thought* that MDT would copy itself to the c:\minint\scripts folder to continue installation.
Next time, when you see this error, Press Shift-F10 to get into a cmd.exe prompt. Can you find litetouch.vbs on any of the drives? Does the USB Drive appear?
IF in fact, the USB Drive is not appearing after the 1st reboot, then you have a problem. Why did the USB 3.0 driver not install. Check the Driver Installation Logs to verify.
Keith Garner - keithga.wordpress.com

Problem mapping USB external drive connected to Airport Extreme on my PC

I am having a problem mapping my USB external drive in my PC running WIndows Vista. Here is what I have so far:
USB External Drive connected to my AirPort Extreme which is connected to my Century Link modem/router.
I have installed the USB drive using the Airport Utility. In the Disks section the Enable File Sharing is checked, Secure Shared Disks is set to With a Disk Password, I have entered the password in the next 2 rows, and finally AirPort Disks Gues Access is set to Not Allowed. The section below named These Settings Configure Windows File Sharing is empty. Am I supposed to put something here?
I was also told I need to map the drive in my PC, but when I go to do that via the Computer and the Map Network Drive, I get stuck where it asks me to enter a folder name. I read many of the posts which tell me I need to enter among other things the disk's ip address, but I am unable to find it anywhere. Where do I find what to put here?
Can someone please help this frustrated user?

I had my USB drive on my APE working with Time Machine under 10.5.1 very reliably. A few days ago however, I needed to suspend a backup operation, and when I came back to restart it, time machine refused to mount the disk image on the drive. After several attempts to get it to connect with no luck I decided to delete the image (the sparce image file) and start over. Now TM refuses to create a new image.
BTW, on the Mac OSX hints site there have been suggestions to start a backup with the drive directly connected, then stop the backup, move the sparce image file to the root of the drive, reconnect the drive to the APE base station to get it working. I tried this again, but I think Apple has changed something in 10.5.2, because when directly connected TM no longer creates a sparce image file.
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WD Essential 500GB USB External Drive Not Recognized

I have a WD USB External Drive which was formatted for use with my old windows based PC. Bought iMac G5 and at first recognized but now does not and when i run disk verify in dissk utility get following error message:
Verifying volume “My Book”
** /dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains
** Phase 3 - Checking Directories
Unable to read directory (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 non HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair
Get same message when I try to repair, any help will be greatly appreciated

Hello! I would try hooking it back up to a pc and run the repair function from there or erase the drive as Mac format and start all over. Tom

USB External Drive Backup & Erase Woes

I have been using a Lacie 500GB USB external drive allocated as a backup disk for time machine. Over the last couple of weeks, the disk has been spontaneously ejecting itself from the desktop. This could happen when not backing up to time machine, or during the backup.
I am not a daily time machine backup-er, as I don't have much to backup on a daily basis (and I weekly backup to an alternative disk using Super Duper). What I had noticed with the time machine disk, is that the preparation prior to the backup beginning was a massive 40+GB, certainly not the amount of data which would have been 'new'.
To try to resolve this, I have used disk utility to verify the disk, and the snow leopard disc to check my boot disk on the Macbook Pro... there has not been a problem identified with either.
Today, I decided to erase the time machine disk, zero the data, and re-allocate the drive for time machine backup. After setting these preferences in disk utility, and clicking 'erase', the disk again erased itself, with the error message :
'Disk erase failed with the error: Assert: internal error, or unimplemented'
I then had an external disk which was not present on the desktop, and apparently in some sort of limbo between erased and mounted!
I was able to do a simpler format function on the disk via disk utility, the disk will mount, but the allocated disk space previously used by time machine is still present, and the format has only done that remaining space on the disk.
Anyone know what the above error message refers to, am I able to reformat the disk using the 'zero function', or has the disk failed and become unrecoverable?
Answers / suggestions kindly welcomed.

Welcome to Apple Discussions.
When you use Disk Utility to erase totally you need to click on the LaCie drive name not the name that appears on the desktop. Select how many partitions you want and give each partition the name you want it to have and perhaps also the partitioning scheme and other options that are available, then erase.
Doing this will of course make all that is on the drive unavailable to you.
These are LaCie's directions for their drives.
Some LaCie drives might also have firmware updates available - worth a check on their website.
Note that LaCie seem to have 2 yr warranty on their drives, at least the one I looked at on their website. If the drive is younger than this you might have a warranty claim.

USB external drive not readable by mac but readable by windows

Hi, I have a usb external drive (Seagate FreeAgentDesktop Media) which works fine with windows xp but cannot be read by the mac. I reinstalled the mac a couple of days ago because it was being very slow and I had a bunch of junk on it. Anyway, after that, it won't read the external drive. It will give me an error message saying that the disk is not readable by the computer. Sometimes it will give me the message saying that the drive was unmounted improperly by windows and for me to unmount it correctly. When I go back to windows, it's there, then I restart and go back to mac, it'll give me the message that the disk is not readable. I have 2 of these drives and both of them have this issue. I also tried disk warrior but it says that the file system cannot be rebuilt. I tried USB flashdrives and they work. I got all the data off of one of the external drives into the other and I couldn't format or even erase the drive because it says that the permission was denied. However, I could format it and erase it with the installation DVD. But I had the same result no matter what format they were in. I have very important data on these drives and I really need to be able to use them with both operating systems. Thanks a lot!

Hi Schmerz Meister;
If DiskWarrior say it can rebuild the disk about your only other alternative it to reformat it.
This will of course destroy all data on the disk so make sure you have copies of the data elsewhere,
Allan

Boot Camp with Win 8 Can't See The USB External Drive [MBR with NTFS, Fat32, HFS Partitions]

Hi. When I boot to Boot Camp with the latest Apple Windows Support drivers can't see my USB Flash Drive, DVD and OS X volumes but not my USB external drive that has an MBR partition scheme (using iPartition from GUID) and in there it has different volumes [HFS when I boot to Snow Leopard, Fat32, NTFS]. What can I do with Boot Camp to make it see my USB external drive and why isn't it seeing the USB when it can see the USB flash drive both use USB?
Thank you in advance.
God bless.

Buy Paragon NTFS for OS X $20.

Trying to move aperture library from USB external drive to FW 800 external drive.i can see the projects but no thumbnails. Error application not responding. Verified permissions before started. It's been 3hours. Recommendations please

I have consolidated iPhoto into aperture 3.2.2 and now have both aperture and iPhoto put consolidated library on 2.0 USB external drive. Have been removing duplicate photos from 23,000 down to 15,000. Problem in trying to close aperture and now tried to move library from 2.0 USB to 800FW and can see projects but no thumbnails. Aperture error now reads not responding. Can I repair library on 2.0 at this point?

Sharon,
did you do anything else besides copying your library to a fire wire drive after your last post Aperture not responding ?
Since that library probalbly already needed fixing, I'd recommend to force quit Aperture and use the "First Aid" to repair your Library.
Aperture 3: Troubleshooting Basics: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805
Regards
Léonie

GRUB hangs when booting Oracle VM Server via USB External Drive

I installed Oracle VM Server 2.1 on USB external drive (/dev/sde - 80gb) with First Sector Boot Partion (/dev/sde1) as /dev/sda1 (MBR) is already occupied. After a successful installation, I changed the hard-disk device sequence (not boot order) so that USB drive is found as first C: drive. All I got was the word 'GRUB' displayed (hangs) and nothing else. How do I get Oracle VM Server to boot? Should I reinstall now that the hard drive sequence has been changed?
Thank you.

Not Oracle VM-related, so I would say: "Google is your friend!".
Search for "grub change boot sequence": http://www.google.com/search?q=grub%20change%20boot%20sequence

MacBook Air USB external drive power source

I have a LaCie 250GB USB external drive on my MacBook Air and the computer is not being able to power the drive without me connecting the hard drive to an external power source. when the drive was had about 80GB of data it would do it, now that the drive has about 180GB of data, it does not work. Can anybody recommend a solution or an external drive that can hold at least 250GB that can be powered by the MacBook Air without need for external power source?

I have the same time of problem. Although, it's mentioned a using a self powered hub. However, I find this did not work. Apple states that the single usb port on the MBA is high powered to give the ext. super drive they sell the power it needs to connect to the MBA. What I have noticed is no matter which USB self powered hub I use I get the same results. The MBA reports that one or more devices is drawing too much power. Although, the powered hub is supposed to provide power to those devices that require power over USB. I should also mention, all I am connecting are two USB devices. 1 ext. Verbatim 500 Gig Drive. and my iPhone. Since the MBA has only 120 gig drive I had to move all of my movies etc. to the Ext. 500 now if I want to sync my phone or move a movie to the phone I get the errors.

Usb external drives not showing up in lion

My USB external drives are NOT showing up in finder or my disk utlity.
But they are showing up in my System Information!?
In addition, they both work fine on my other laptop.
I can I troubleshoot this on my mac?
Relevant Info:
Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5
MacBook Pro
USB Kindle Updated OS
USB External Drive

I reset my PRAM and it works now. I've no idea what that did...
Thanks for the help.
MC

USB external drive vs. Firewire

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