external drive for macbook

Dan82

Looking at buying a external drive for my macbook, late 09 model, just wondering where i would get a good value one, im putting new ssd into the macbook so needs to store all my music, and data, 500g one is what im looking for,

advice would be great

taylorconor95

Head in to any harvey normans or compub, usually ~€150 for 500G.

When I put my SSD into my MacBook Pro however, I got rid of the optical (CD) drive and put my HDD in there using a caddy. I have all my music, photos and movies on my HDD while keeping my SSD clear, with the bonus of not having to carry around a big hard drive with me.

holystungun9

I've got four seagate go-flex drives. Haven't had any problems. I have a mac with Fire wire and one with out so I can just swap the connectors on my external drives and use whichever drive I want.

The 500 gig ones are selling for about €80 I think.

sbran

check out a company called ccity.ie or order one from ebay they are getting alot cheaper these days or what you could do is get a 2.5 inch sata case from ebay prob about 20e and use your old hard drive from the macbook and turn it into an external drive ?

Bang Bang

I got the Seagate Expansion 2TB in Argos last week for €125, and it came with a free Sandisk 4GB flash drive.

Dan82

taylorconor95 wrote: »

Head in to any harvey normans or compub, usually ~€150 for 500G.

When I put my SSD into my MacBook Pro however, I got rid of the optical (CD) drive and put my HDD in there using a caddy. I have all my music, photos and movies on my HDD while keeping my SSD clear, with the bonus of not having to carry around a big hard drive with me.

I'm getting the ssd fitted tomorrow, I've a 256 in the machine so would I be aswel to just take out cd drive and put the 256 in there and slot ssd in and work away?

Is it big work to take cd drive out of MacBook it's late 2009 model,

Where is the best place to get caddy to do this?

Thanks

firkin

I have a Seagte Expansion 1TB as my Time Machine drive and it works *pretty* good with my iMac.
But I discovered they aren't actually compatible with macs!
They interfere with the power saving mode, so its stop my Mac from automatically sleeping. Also, if I kill my screen but keep the iMac awake to act as a media server the Expansion keeps clicking on and off repeatedly, which would cause a lot of unnecessary wear on the drive most likely leading to a quick death.
So whenever I want to use my iMac as a DLNA server I have to unplug my Expansion drive.

When I took a look over at Seagate's and Apple's forums I discovered to my surprise, that not all external hard drives are compatible with macs. I really thought that there would be no compatibility issue [apart from having to reformat the drive for OS X] but there is.

So my advice is if you want 100% compatibility make sure it explicitly says mac compatible on the box. The Segate Expansion range are not explicitly compatible.

Having that said apart from clashing with the power management features of the mac my Expansion does work with it as you'd expect, but it took me a long time to figure out why my mac never automatically went to sleep.

If I was buying again I'd get one that was 100% compatible.

DubDJ

I've the 1TB version of this. Had the 500GB version but recently upgraded to 1TB. I use it wit Time Machine to constantly backup my files. World flawlessly. Really good build quality but more important is its FireWire. So better speeds than USB 2.0. If your Macbook has a FireWire port i'd recommend it.

Losty Dublin

I' ve a La Fie 2TB external drive. Cost me a hell of a lot last year but it was new and it comes with Firewire 400 and 800 and HDMI; it's metal cased and very hard built so it feels like it will last the course. I'd say it will be a lot cheaper these days.

mystufforsale

Dan82 wrote: »

Looking at buying a external drive for my macbook, late 09 model, just wondering where i would get a good value one, im putting new ssd into the macbook so needs to store all my music, and data, 500g one is what im looking for,

advice would be great

If your still interested Lidl are doing an external 500gb Toshiba usb drive this week.

Dan82

mystufforsale wrote: »

If your still interested Lidl are doing an external 500gb Toshiba usb drive this week.

dont think it works with mac

mystufforsale

Dan82 wrote: »

dont think it works with mac

its an external usb drive why wouldnt it work?

mathepac

Losty Dublin wrote: »

I' ve a La Fie ... external drive. .... Firewire 400 it's metal cased and very hard built so it feels like it will last the course. .

I've had two LaCie external drives fail, the only drives to do so. Yes externally built like tanks with good enclosures, but internally they were junk. The enclosures live on with different drives installed.

firkin

mystufforsale wrote: »

its an external usb drive why wouldnt it work?

There can be conflicts with the Energy Saver settings on OS X where the drive can prevent your mac from sleeping.

I also have an issue where the external drive goes into a cycle of continuously powering up and down every 60seconds if I put the mac's display to sleep [which would cause excessive wear to the drive leading to a shorter life]. I put the display to sleep when I want to use the mac as a DLNA server

Next time round I'll go for one that explicitly works with macs

Dan82

Learned alot while getting this sorted, not just as simple as it as first looks, Mac are expensive piece of kit, in end i handed mine over to the guys in ITGroup, unreal job they done and they could answer all question and put me on the right road, The guy i dealt with was Rory and i couldnt speak highly enough of there work, had to get iPad screen replaced too, looks like a new iPad, worth doing the research on any of these things before handing over your devices or messing with them yourself