Buying External Hard Drive For Mac

geoffraffe

I'm looking at buying an external hard drive (1Tb) for my mac book. It's running Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L31a) presently.

My Q is: Can I buy any hard drive, or do I need a specific one that works on macs? Sorry, this might be very obvious. I've looked at a few and I'm a bit confused at the moment.

Any help would be very much appreciated and if anyone knows of any good places to buy, that would be great too.

Thanks for you help.

Deep Thought

You can buy ones specifically designed for Mac

Most HDD are configured for PC and are NFTS, this mean you can plug it into the mac and Mac will mount it OK, but AFAIK copy from it but not to it

I have bought everyday HDD but have a program Paragon NFTS running which allows me to read/ write to any HDD

Bought mine from various places..Ebay, Pixmania, PC World etc...

I stand corrected

ZENER

in my experience Mac specific external drives tend to be a bit more expensive than PC ones.

Just but the cheapest one and format it in Disc Utility to suit the Mac. There's nothing physically different with the hardware.

Ken

Stainless_Steel

I think most drives you buy will be FAT32 format so shouldn't have any issues.

mathepac

ZENER wrote: »

... Just but the cheapest one and format it in Disc Utility to suit the Mac. ...

+1 but this will mean the interface will be relatively slow USB rather than FireWire. BTW don't forget a cable.

Greentree_uk

Any external Hard drive will work with your mac. Most MAC badged ones have extra ports like firewire 400 or 800 both are faster interfaces than usb 2.0. They also usually pre mac formatted.

As I said before any drive will work, if you are to use it solely on your mac I'd recommend you reformat your drive Mac OS Extended (Journaled). you will need to use disk utility for this.

ZENER wrote: »

Just but the cheapest one and format it in Disc Utility to suit the Mac. There's nothing physically different with the hardware.

Ken

Drives are not equal at all! some have 5400rpm drives, others have 7200rpm, if speed matters to you then you had better check your interfaces. Also some internal parts are slower than others. Obviously some enclosures are more expensive too. Others provide better cooling for your drive, some are more aesthetically pleasing etc.

ZENER

What I meant was that for a given model, e.g. The WD MyBook, there is no difference between the Mac and PC version from the point of view of the internal drive. Naturally the premis that you get what you pay for always holds true. never more so than when you're talking about storing valuable data !!

Apologies for not being more specific :rolleyes:

ken

Jagle

Stainless_Steel wrote: »

I think most drives you buy will be FAT32 format so shouldn't have any issues.

well fat32 being one issue :rolleyes:.. only good for usb thumb drives.
terrible for a 1tb drive to be formatted fat32

thegalavanter

You can make any hard drive work on a mac. Its just about formatting it so it does so. There are websites out there that explain in detail how to make it so you can work it on a pc or mac. For me I have it so I can read and write with mac and just read with pc when its connected to my mac. However, if I connect it to a pc it will read and write the pc side but can't even see the mac side of it. Sadly this was the best scenario I could make for myself.

geoffraffe

Thank you for all the replies (I'm just logging in now).

So I can buy any drive and format it (using info from a website) so that it will run on my mac. Sounds easy enough.

Sincere thanks for all your info and for taking the time to reply.

ashleey

Look for a 7200 rpm drive for faster read/write if it is important. If so it will unlikely to be bus powered and so will require plugging to the mains etc. for fastest read/ write look for ssd but expect a big jump in price. If you want portability use a 5400 rpm bus powered drive. These can be a bit temperamental with regard to sleeping the mac without prior disconnection as per my experience with a g drive mini. I use an Iomega minimax fw 800 for fixed connection at home to my mac mini and it is great. The Iomega site has a good list of alternatives too

ashleey

Fw800 is faster than USB 2.0 which is comparable to fw400. A good drive should come with the required cables

keanos_boot

I'm a new MAC user (OSx 10.6.8) and looking to buy a wireless external hard drive so I can backup the pc without having the drive beside the pc.

Any suggestion of good ones or ones to avoid?

Grateful for any help!

ashleey

If you mean backup your mac using time machine then you need to buy a time capsule.

DubDJ

I just ordered a 500Gb one off Apple. It's a Hitachi G-Tech G-Drive. It's made for mac. I was looking around for one to support firewire 800 and this is the best I found. I originally ordered an alternative but they were backlogged with orders so I cancelled my order.

You can however buy any hard drive you like and just format it using Disc Utility to work for your mac. No need to worry there.

Solair

The only thing to be ware of, and this is really only if you're involved in video / audio production work, is that FireWire connections are significantly faster than USB 2.0.

Sometimes a FireWire drive isn't much more expensive and it can make a big difference for playing around with audio/video.

Apple's support for USB 3.0 is still non-existent, so just bear that in mind when buying a drive.

As for the drive itself *any* USB or Firewire external drive will work with a Mac. Just format it with Disk Utility as HFS+ Journaled before you start using it. As pointed out above, most drives come pre-formatted in a configuration suitable for Windows machines.

If sharing the disk with a Windows machine, you'll need 3rd party software to allow Windows to read HFS+ disks. NTFS is read-only on Mac OS X too.

One good solution is to create a partition and format it in a file system that either OS can read and write to and use it as a drop box.

Wibbs

Some drive makers out there that have mac and PC lines can make the mac formatting difficult. Had this issue with a seagate formatted for PC(cheaper than the mac version of course...). It would not format in Disk utility. As a single partition anyway. It would format as two or more though. A third party utility Drive 10 did format it however. A computer engineer I know explained the whys of this but I'm afraid to admit I've forgotten.

ashleey wrote: »

If you mean backup your mac using time machine then you need to buy a time capsule.

This is incorrect. Any external hard drive that is formatted for mac can be used as a Time Machine Backup. Indeed I'd personally advise against Time Capsule as ones only backup as they have a well known high failure rate(I went through 4 replacements in the course of a year myself. Outside of the serial number range of admitted dodgy units too.). Lack of ventilation in the pursuit of looking stylish just one issue. Save the Apple premium and buy a better quality/faster/bigger drive for less money. Losing wireless backup? Again IMHO and IME wireless backup is great if you're not updating lots of big files on a daily basis, otherwise it can be bloody slow.

Good advice from Solair with regard to USB/firewire. If you can, get the firewire version. Even if you're not doing much video/audio work they're noticeably faster in use compared to USB2.

Dermoth

Just bought a WD My Book off amazon. Formatted in no time and working fine. FireWire is great but probably not essential for backup drive - using this new drive as Time Machine backup so USB 2.0 is grand. I use another myBook with FW800 as I keep all music/photos movies on this rather than internal drive on mac.