A Yellow Fellow
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I need an external hard drive for my macbook that can hold at least 500gb. I'm trying to find the cheapest price that is also reliable and won't crash on me. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
External Hard Drive
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unopepito06
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I have 3 1tb external HDs, 1 2tb, and a 250gb, all Western Digital, and they've all performed great over the last 5 or 6 years. I wouldn't recommend anything else, then again, I haven't used anything else. I have heard a lot of horror stories about Seagates crashing, my dad even said he had some crash on him back in the day.
WD makes a few Mac-specific hard drives, but they're fairly expensive compared to the pc ones. The good news is that you can reformat any WD HD to work on a Mac. Here's a couple troubleshooting posts about reformatting:
http://blog.adamnash.com/2008/01/26...n-digital-wd-1tb-my-book-external-hard-drive/
http://www.chromewalker.com/cw_six/?p=1032
They're from 2008 so they may be out of date by now, but they should give you an idea of where to start if you choose that route. A lot of people have trouble reformatting, and that's where these two posts come in handy. I don't own a Mac so I have no experience, but it sounds like you should be able to format the drives right from the Mac, which is good, because I had heard long ago that you had to have a pc to do it in the first place. Definitely something to check on first.
I like the WD Elements line, they're cheap, and they do what they're supposed to do, without any of the bullshit background backup utilities constantly running and interrupting everything you do (basically a program that runs and backs up all your files to the drive, through a GUI. I'm not a fan, I feel it doesn't give me enough control, and I can't see exactly what's getting moved over); I believe a hard drive should plug in and be completely dumb, a usb slave I can just drag and drop to without running any utilities, which western digital is famous for lately. The elements fits this need perfectly. They come in flavors from 500gb (as low as 50 bucks) all the way up to 3 terabytes, but if you decide to get crazy and go for the 3tb you may run into some problems with size limitations in the operating system; again, I don't know for sure as I don't own a Mac and couldn't find a clear answer, but another something to check out if you decide to go down that route.
Elements line on Amazon
Elements line on Newegg
(And definitely shop around to see if you can get a better price).
Or if you really want a backup utility, I would go with one from their standard line, though you'll probably have to go with the Mac-specific one in order to get the utility functioning on your Mac. Again, with these you may have to worry about a persistent utility, and there's also a piece of software on the drive that runs everytime you plug it in, and there's a virtual cd permanently on the drive that can't be removed that takes up some space - as I said, it's all a pain in the ass. With the elements drives you don't have to worry about any of that. But just in case you're interested in those:
Mac drives on Newegg
Good luck!
WD makes a few Mac-specific hard drives, but they're fairly expensive compared to the pc ones. The good news is that you can reformat any WD HD to work on a Mac. Here's a couple troubleshooting posts about reformatting:
http://blog.adamnash.com/2008/01/26...n-digital-wd-1tb-my-book-external-hard-drive/
http://www.chromewalker.com/cw_six/?p=1032
They're from 2008 so they may be out of date by now, but they should give you an idea of where to start if you choose that route. A lot of people have trouble reformatting, and that's where these two posts come in handy. I don't own a Mac so I have no experience, but it sounds like you should be able to format the drives right from the Mac, which is good, because I had heard long ago that you had to have a pc to do it in the first place. Definitely something to check on first.
I like the WD Elements line, they're cheap, and they do what they're supposed to do, without any of the bullshit background backup utilities constantly running and interrupting everything you do (basically a program that runs and backs up all your files to the drive, through a GUI. I'm not a fan, I feel it doesn't give me enough control, and I can't see exactly what's getting moved over); I believe a hard drive should plug in and be completely dumb, a usb slave I can just drag and drop to without running any utilities, which western digital is famous for lately. The elements fits this need perfectly. They come in flavors from 500gb (as low as 50 bucks) all the way up to 3 terabytes, but if you decide to get crazy and go for the 3tb you may run into some problems with size limitations in the operating system; again, I don't know for sure as I don't own a Mac and couldn't find a clear answer, but another something to check out if you decide to go down that route.
Elements line on Amazon
Elements line on Newegg
(And definitely shop around to see if you can get a better price).
Or if you really want a backup utility, I would go with one from their standard line, though you'll probably have to go with the Mac-specific one in order to get the utility functioning on your Mac. Again, with these you may have to worry about a persistent utility, and there's also a piece of software on the drive that runs everytime you plug it in, and there's a virtual cd permanently on the drive that can't be removed that takes up some space - as I said, it's all a pain in the ass. With the elements drives you don't have to worry about any of that. But just in case you're interested in those:
Mac drives on Newegg
Good luck!
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