Best External Hard Drive For A Mac

I want to buy a 500 Gig External Hard Drive. I'll be using it to temporarily store digital photo files. It needs to have Triple interface FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. I would like to keep the cost to about $250 or less. I have read some reviews online but was wondering if anyone on this forum had any experience and recommendations on a brand or a specific model that you like?

Thanks

For the past several years, I've bought my internal/external drives from Other World Computing. I've also used a number of LaCie drives too. Never had one problem. Where's the "knock on wood" emoticon?

Laurie, Go to Costco and pick up My Book. Seems to me it was around 200--maybe less. Works well. Made by Western Digital.

Carol

I've been very happy with my Newer Technology drive from OWC (as above). Even has multiple ports for expansion. I'm also happy with the performance of the Maxtor One-Touch III (1TB) drive I recently purchased. I was -not- happy with the G-Force drive I bought last year. It had a very noisy fan and was terrible slow.

Ken

There is no need to spend a bunch of money on Mac specific hard drives (Lacie, etc.). You can easily format any standard hard drive to Mac OS Journaled/Extended format via Disk Utility. Open up a Lacie some time and you'll find that they build the enclosure only and drop a Western Digital or Maxtor drive in it. You end up paying way more for the sexy enclosures (which have been very flaky in the past). For my macs, I just buy the fastest name brand drives (Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate) and then put them in a reasonable quality enclosure (very easy to install, takes about 2 minutes). You might find a deal on Craigslist. Pricewatch.com has alot of cheap brand name hard drives and separate enclosures (Don't buy the generic junk from China). Be sure to get a new brand name SATA 300 drive with 16 MB cache for optimal performance. These are also called 3gb/s Serial ATA drives. You can get a new 500 GB SATA 300 with 16MB cache for less than a hundred bucks and an enclosure for about twenty bucks.

Laurie, which mac do you have?

Thanks everyone for the advice.

Scott, I currently have a 500 MHZ Power PC G4. I will also be buying a new iMac this month. I mainly want the new hard drive to use with my old G4 (totally full 10 Gig HD) which will be used ONLY for processing my digital photos. The new iMac will be used for the Internet and other things. I also want to be able to hook up the drive to both computers. So far I have only looked at drives made by Maxtor/Seagate and Western Digital.

I've been reading that it's possible to boot a Mac OSX system from a Firewire External Hard Drive. If this is correct I was thinking of using the external hard drive as my main system hard drive. Or would performance be to slow to do this? Do you or anyone else have any experience with this?

Laurie, you can boot a mac from an external firewire drive (not USB) if the external drive is a disc image (often an option for mac backup software). However, this configuration was created for seamless recovery, not for daily operation. The only time that you would ever want to use an external HD as a startup disc is if it were an eSATA drive (which is essentially the same setup as an internal SATA drive, but physically located outside of the computer box in an external enclosure). Even the new Mac Pro desktops don't have an eSATA connection yet. That said, why not just add another internal HD to your PPC G4 tower? This would be the cheapest option and would give you the fastest performance. You could pick up a 60GB for next to nothing. Better yet, why not transfer the photos to the new iMac and get an external HD for backup.? Editing photos on the iMac will be MUCH faster than using your old 500mhz g4. If you must edit on the old machine, get an external HD that has both firewire 400 (for the old machine) and firewire 800 (for the new machine). If the two computers are near each other, you could hook the HD up to both computers at once. Only one computer can read the HD at a time, but you wouldn't have to deal with changing out the power supply and cables. Finally, I highly recommend buying at mac backup program called SuperDuper. It is very easy to use and cheap (I paid about 30 bucks). It does backups in disc image format on a custom schedule and can handle any # of "grandfather" backups.

Thanks Scott for all the information. I'm now thinking I may add both an internal and external drive. I was resisting adding an internal because I haven't any experience installing one and I presently have no clue on the specs of a HD that will fit. It's a bit intimidating but no time like the present to learn something new.

I haven't been impressed with my Western Digital 250GB external drive. It's FireWire 400, but it took 36+ hours to back up 60GB from the drives in my dual PPC 2GHz G5. It would have been faster to write it to DVD's!!!

There are eSATA interface cards out there that will let you interface an external SATA drive to your machine. That's where you'll find the best performance, if performance is an issue for you. Good luck!

Thanks Arlen for the info. My options for a HD upgrade are increasing.

I found out the my G4 can only take an internal HD up to 120GB. If I want to use a larger HD I need to use a SATA drive and install a SATA controller card into a PCI socket.

This new info has me rethinking everything. Anyone with any thoughts about if I would get better performance adding a larger internal drive with a SATA controller card or going with an eSATA card and an external HD with a eSATA connection?