Hard Drive REcommendations

Like many of us, I am interested in getting an external ahrd drive so that I can use the new Time Machine. What are the recommendations of you experts as to brand and model?

 

Circuit City has various Western Digital external drives on sale this week. The prices are close to what you'd pay at Newegg. I prefer WD drives because, if they fail, their warranty processing is second to none. They offer cross-shipment, and they're extremely fast in getting a replacement out to you. It's much better service than I've received from other HDD makers, including Maxtor and Seagate.

 

I like Seagate or Lacie.

I greatly dislike Maxtor.

 

I recently got a WD Passport for under $100. It is very portable, and works great on just the USB.

 

Seagate's external hard drives are pretty nice. WD is a pretty popular brand as well.

 

I just got a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160gb for $109 at Bestbuy. You can't get the bare drive itself any cheaper, even online, and this is in an enclosure. It comes with Seagates a Sata 5400.3 momentus hd, PMR, USB connection and very fast transfer rates, and 5 year warranty

 

is this for a notebook computer? If so, I would suggest going to get yourself a Hitachi USB drive here:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8355709&st=hitachi&type=product&id=1177112455216
Go to your local BB store and look for one that has a DTG serial number. That one houses the best notebook HDD available, the 7k200. Take it out, upgrade your mac and use your old drive in the enclosure as the external HDD. The drive itself sells for about $200 at most places.

 

*above* just a note.. only Macbooks can be upgraded.. not MBP unless you're out of warranty.

Also, that's a great deal!

 

I am likeing the newer MyBooks from WD. They are formatted for Macs now which is nice. All in all, you really can't go wrong with any name brand, they will all fail eventually, and one is not guaranteed to last longer than another.

 

First decide how portable you want this to be. Smaller = more expensive.

Also, depending on the size you want, it might be more cost-effective to simply get an enclosure for an internal.

Finally, decide which interface you want. Every HDD will offer USB2.0 connectivity, but every brand has a variety of other options too - Firewire 400, Firewire 800, eSata, and network, and of course any combination thereof.

I haven't had any problems with my WD drives, especially when using them as new. Keep in mind that although OS X can read NTFS drives, it was not able to recognize my older MyBook NTFS drive at all - I had to reformat it to get OS X to see it. Since you're buying a new drive though, this shouldn't be an issue since you'd probably format it anyway.

As others have mentioned, stick with the bigger name brands. Better warranty, but also when you call Apple support and they go down their list of things to rule out, it'll save you some time if they actually recognize the brand.