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    External HDD--recommendations?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by modal, Sep 18, 2007.

  1. modal

    modal Notebook Guru

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    Hi all,

    I've been looking around a bit online looking for good ideas for external hard drives. Ideally, I would like to store a complete image of my MacBook's hard drive, a complete image of my desktop Ubuntu installation, and a few (ok, about 100GB) of media and other files. I think capacity in the 250-320GB range should work. My criteria, in order of importance, are:

    1. Reliability (obviously)
    2. Flexibility (can I partition the drive and format it in HFS? How about ext3?)
    3. FireWire connection (not a deal-breaker if it doesn't have this, but it would be nice)
    4. Portability.

    I don't care if it comes with backup software since I'll just be using rsync for most things anyway.

    Let me know if you have thoughts.

    Thanks.
     
    modal, Sep 18, 2007
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  2. Sam

    Sam Notebook Virtuoso

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    Any hard drive can be formatted to be HFS+, just use Disk Utility. However, if you want to share files between OS X and Windows on one external hard drive, or a partition of it, I'd suggest you format it to be FAT32, which can be read and written on both sides.

    I've heard good things about Seagate's drives.
     
    Sam, Sep 18, 2007
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  3. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    If portability is an important issue for you then you are going to have to get mobile HDs (2.5"), and the greatest size those come into is currently 250GB.
    I would personally recommend Lacie drives if reliability is important, although other brands like Seagate and Western Digital are very reliable as well.
     
    Budding, Sep 19, 2007
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  4. Starlight

    Starlight Notebook Evangelist

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    1. Western Digital MyBook seem to work well, never heard anyone complain about them so far. I have one (500 GB) and am planning to get another.
    2. Any hard drive can do that. As for ext3, I assume you are aware that OS X cannot read that (unless you find some application/driver that lets you), but this is of course not an issue if you only want that partition for Linux use. FAT32 is (unfortunately) still the way to go for cross-OS compatibility.
    3. For the MyBook line, the basic version is only USB2 but the next step up has FW400. Another step up has FW800.
    4. Well, it's not the smallest external hd out there, but about equal to most of the competition I guess. You can only shrink the enclosure for a 3.5" drive so much, this particular one is not at the forefront of slim enclosures but the weight is pretty good.
     
    Starlight, Sep 19, 2007
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