Best External Hard Drive?

[gameface]

Hi guys, I'm looking at getting an external hard drive to back up my Powerbook. since I handle a lot of video and photo files (I use Final Cut and Photoshop 7), I figure I'll need at least 200gig. Any recommendations? In your experiences, what hard drives worked best (or worst) for your Macs? So far, I'm looking at Maxtor and Lacie.

[Henjie]

Originally posted by gameface
Hi guys, I'm looking at getting an external hard drive to back up my Powerbook. since I handle a lot of video and photo files (I use Final Cut and Photoshop 7), I figure I'll need at least 200gig. Any recommendations? In your experiences, what hard drives worked best (or worst) for your Macs? So far, I'm looking at Maxtor and Lacie.

Are you looking to get an external Firewire 400 or Firewire 800 hard drive?

As far as hard drives are concerned, my top three choices would be the Hitachi Deskstar 7K250, the Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB, and the Maxtor MaXLine Plus II (in that order). 250GB drives with 8MB caches. Since you're gonna use them in an external Firewire enclosure, you won't be needing the SATA versions of the drives, just the regular (and cheaper) ATA/100 (or ATA/133 in the case of the Maxtor) versions.

You can always build your own external Firewire 400/800 hard drive by buying one of the aforementioned drives and installing it in an external Firewire 400/800 enclosure. You can save a few bucks by going this route, not to mention you get to pick which hard drive and/or enclosure you want.

If you'd rather buy a pre-built drive, check out this older thread re: external Firewire hard drives. When comparing the OWC, EZQuest, and LaCie options, the OWC Mercury Elite Pros seem to be the best. They're only available online though.

Hope this helps. :-)


~Henjie

[gameface]

Great, will look into this. Thanks Henjie!

[ginoledesma]

If you're going to go the cheap route (i.e., build your own using an external enclosure and an internal drive), make sure to get the ones (enclosures) that support large drives. Several of the older ones don't support drives larger than 160GB. Also, for guaranteed compatibility with the Mac, get an enclosure that has the Oxford 911/922 chipset. These support over 300GB drives. I've noticed that some of the cheap-o enclosures use non-standard power adapters, so that may or may not be a good thing. Most of them are either made of plastic or aluminum -- which one to get depends on your taste. I feel that the plastic is a bit more rugged, but I don't wanna test that out. Also, make sure to get an enclosure with a fan -- I've seen some external DIYs fail (or at least perform subpar) due to heat.

I got myself an old no-name Firewire/USB2.0 enclosure for my iBook, and it houses a Seagate 120GB Baracuda drive. It's much faster than the internal 4200-rpm disk drive, so I use that more for disk-intensive apps. The enclosure sports a fan, an Oxford 911 chipset, and a standard PC plug.

[Edited on 7-31-2004 by ginoledesma]

[dominiquejames]

henjie, are the external drives you mentioned available locally? at about what price range does portable hard drives (of 250 MB) come up to nowadays? what other possible firewire drives are available right now?

[weremermaid]

Hi carlo,
Try EZQuest, they have 120, 200 and 250 GB External Firewire 800 and USB 2 Hard Drives. The bigger capacity ones are bus powered, though EZQuest does have portable 20-100GB drives, enclosure included.

All the cables you need come in the box, including the power supply and installer CD. Take a look here.

These run at 7200RPM which means real time video data rates = darned fast. These babies can be used by both Mac/PC though Mac alone is of course the best way to go. LMK Commercial is the Philippine distributor.

Cherrie

Originally posted by gameface
Hi guys, I'm looking at getting an external hard drive to back up my Powerbook. since I handle a lot of video and photo files (I use Final Cut and Photoshop 7), I figure I'll need at least 200gig. Any recommendations? In your experiences, what hard drives worked best (or worst) for your Macs? So far, I'm looking at Maxtor and Lacie.

[Edited on 8-11-2004 by weremermaid]

[alfiesy]

Wouldn't recommend EZquest external hard drive. My unit's power supply broke down twice in the span of a year, first about 10 months into its use, the second just as the warranty ended. Was expensive to repair. (Cost me 2K to get the power supply fixed).

[Edited on 8-11-2004 by alfiesy]

[Tantantiniiin]

If you are going to build your own, or order someone to build you one, make sure that the ports are aligned with the holes when it is delivered. The one I ordered didnt have an aligned mini Firewire port, after connecting the cable, the port inside the housing chipped off. After a few e-mail correspondences, the unit was sent to Taiwan, and up to now, more than a month since I sent it back, the unit still hasnt gotten back and I cant get a word on when it'll be returned.

[rbpops]

anyone with any experience on seagate external harddrive? been following the threads on external hard drives and the terms and specs are still quite difficult for me to comprehend. basically i need an external hard drive to back up files and store a couple of movie files that are eating into my current storage space. these movies - i still dont want to burn into dvd because i need to edit them still.....so basically theyre just sitting there eating up space.