Advice on reliable mac external drive?

At the moment I'm using an Iomega external drive for my Macbook pro backup and Time Machine, but I'm looking to buy another external drive (1tb+) for storing films and TV programs.

Can anyone recommend a particular brand/model?

 

depends, do you want a small form factor to move it around alot, a physically larger unit for LOTS of storage or something with a RAID for redundancy?

 

I'm a fan of G-Drives. I've had several WD drives die out on me (so I don't recommend WD at all), but I have no issues what-so-ever with the G-Drives.

I've got the small 500GB Mini on Firewire and the big 2TB for home backups.

http://www.g-technology.com/

 

I guess something I can move around with...

 

Who's hard drive do they use?

 

i am using this one http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/freeagent/freeagent_go/ , so far so good

 

G drive uses Hitachi and WD Drives

I use lots of the seagate units

 

I'm looking for a 1TB+

The link above (Beige) is for a small drive...

 

I prefer Seagate drives over others. Something to consider is a hard drive dock instead of external enclosures. I current use a single & dual HDD docks but plan to go NAS once I find the perfect enclosure. With the docks, no more opening up the enclosure when I want to use different hard drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...BESTMATCH&Description=hard+drive+dock&x=0&y=0

 

I know some people have issues with WD but I've had a 320GB Passport for two years, using it heavily on both Macs and PCs (two partitions, one for Mac/Time Machine) and it's been rock solid and they're cheap.

While I've never owned a G-drive and can't comment on their performance, they do look phenomenal next to any Mac.

 

i bought an hitachi 1tb drive off of aria.co.uk and its awsome.

works pefectly with my mac, can use time machine 2

 

I have one of those 120GB WD pocket drives and it is kicking after 3 years riding in my backpack. It is FAT32 so it worked fine on windows and now on mac. Both of my desktop external drives are internal drives that I put into boxes and one is a four year old WD and the other is a year old Seagate. I have had no issues with Western Digital throughout the years but have heard Seagate and Hitachi are a bit better.

 

You might want to check out Lacie hard drives, they have very good reviews and I also own one and they are solid.

 

Why buy an external from a 3rd party? Just buy an external made from WD/Seagate. The 3rd parties use WD/Seagate anyway.

Also don't buy Mac specific hard drives.

 

It's not about Mac specific hard drives, as there is no such thing

G-Drive uses Hitachi drives (the ones I have).

 

For those thinking about NAS storage, I highly recommend Synology NAS units. They're easy to use and have a boatload of functionality...I especially like the remote web access to the file sharing app with easy DDNS configuration. Bear in mind you are only buying the NAS enclosure, so it's BYO hard drive I can confirm they are easily Mac compatible and work with Time Machine with the 2.2 firmware.

www.synology.com

NAS may be a more expensive option, but IMHO the functionality they provide is worth it. And with the BYO hard drive, you don't have to hunt for manufacturers with the drives you like. FWIW, I love WD drives and have a 1TB WD Green HDD in my Synology DiskStation and it consumes very little power and runs nice and cool which is very important for something always powered on. Also any good NAS should be able to sleep the drive anyway.

QNAP NAS boxes also get very high ratings/reviews. www.qnap.com

 

Hence, my emphasis on not buying Mac Hard drives.

 

maybe this belongs in the hardware section instead of the apple section, since it has everything to do with computer hardware and nothing to do with apple?

 

Here u go
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/freeagent/freeagent_xtreme/
2tb

 

I've seen many many hard drives of all brands and types fail working in IT... enough to not really think one is much better than another just because of the brand. That said, for my own personal use, I have used Seagate and Western Digital drives forever, since hard drives first started being sold. I've only ever had 1 drive fail on me....

Seagate is a good company, but their quality went down a little bit when they bought Maxtor... Maxtor was having such money problems their last few years they put out cheap junk as fast as they could and had more than double the failure rates of other drives. This bled into Seagate for awhile sadly, but its picking back up now.

 

I vote for this one to.
i have the 500 gig (the silver one for MAC) and several colleagues have the 500 gig for Windows (they are just formatted for each OS) and i picked up a Freeagent go dock for it as well (dock it when your home or at the office). Great drive.
I have had mine for about a year, dropped it several times, and maxed it out several times. It is still chugging along.
I just picked up 5 of the 320 gig units to issues to my staff as well.