I know there have been “recommend an external hard drive” threads before (at least one in the last six months), but I’ve got kind of a different situation, plus with the speed of advances I figured the answer is probably changing pretty fast.
Here’s my situation:
I have a one-year-old iMac (bought right before the switch to Intel, dammit), 160 GB hard drive. I’ve got large files I’m going to need to back up and store somewhere, but I won’t need regular access to them or anything; a hard drive I can copy them to and then stick in the closet will be fine.
I’m thinking I need at least 200 GB; when I say I have “large files,” I’m talking at least 4 GB, and in the next year I’ll be creating one probably around 80-100 GB. The drive will need firewire, because I’m not a particularly patient person.
What do you folks suggest? Links and brand-names would be appreciated; I’ve never bought one of these before, and I’m just realizing that my 160 GB internal drive, which seemed infinite when I got it, is going to fill up in a few months. (My last computer’s hard drive was 6 GB.)
Also, if there’s some solution other than an external drive that I’ve never heard of, feel free to throw that out there; I just need to be able to save really huge files where I can retrieve them.
FWIW I just bought a Western Digital 250GB premium My book for $149.95 from Amazon.com It ships from Tiger Direct with about $9 shipping.
Amazon was cheaper than all the other sites I checked for this unit.
The premium line is both USB 2.0 and Firewire.
the essential line is USB only.
Or you could just say screw it and get yourself a terrabyte of back up.
External hard drives are commodities, meaning there’s very difference among them. However, what I purchased is an Adaptec external drive enclosure (about $30 for the USB version and a little more for the USB/Firewire one) and put a spare drive in it. The advantage of this approach is that I can upgrade it with a larger hard drive as needed.
I thought about that
Let’s see, $85 bucks for a 250GB Western Digital drive that has the same specs as the external drive I bought
Call it $40 for a USB/Firewire enclosure
Add say $10 retail for each of the firewire, and USB cables that come with the external.
we are now up to $145 and the external comes with back up software.
Pretty much of a push from where I am looking at it.
GusNSpot, the iMac (the whole thing) looks like this; you can’t really add anything to the inside of it.
Thanks for the input, everyone; I’ll probably just drag the jillelope over to Best Buy some weekend and get something that way. I was hoping someone would have a super-cheap Web site for such things or some such, but it looks like, if I’m going to get something new (I don’t want used or refurbished for important file backups), I’m not going to beat Best Buy’s prices by more than a few bucks.
Does your iFruit have USB2? ISTR the last IBM models did; Check out LaCie… I just picked up a USB2 250gigger for about $130. No FireWire, but comparing USB2 to FireWire(400, specifically), it’s a negligible speed difference.
Current Macs have USB2 and FireWire connections. Unless you’ve got the Mac Pro tower, there’s no getting inside the case, and no empty spaces to put an internal drive.
Let me throw something else into the mix - Leopard (arriving in Spring, 2007) will have something called Time Machine for automating backups. From what I’ve seen, it will require its own volume, as opposed to a folder on a volume.
This means if you buy (say) a 200 GB external drive, you’ll need to devote the whole thing to Time Machine. If you buy one of the terabyte-in-a-box drives, those are usually configurable to be either a 1TB drive split across the four internal drives, a 500GB drive with internal mirroring, or 4 250GB drives.
So, by planning ahead, you may be able to use a terabyte-in-a-box drive for storage and Time Machine, but if you use individual drives in individual enclosures, you’ll need one for data and another for Time Machine.
The iMac does indeed have USB. Not sure about USB2, but the machine’s only a year old, so maybe.
Regardless, even if I’m transferring a 20 GB file and it takes a few hours, I can let it go overnight or something. (I’m chucking the “not particularly patient”/firewire requirement for price considerations.)
Make sure your solution has some sort of redundancy. It would really suck if the drive were to go pop. So either get a unit with mirrorred disks or get two units.