External Hard drive for Macbook Pro

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014




What Brand of external hard drive is in general the better option when purchasing one for the Macbook pro? Does it have to do more with its space than the brand or should I invest more money on one that is more expensive assuming that it would be the better option?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    galleygalley Posts: 971member
    The 500GB Western Digital My Book Pro has USB 2.0, FW400 and FW800 for $229 from Amazon, and a 3-year warranty. The case is the same color as the MacBook Pro.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    resres Posts: 711member
    The brands I usually recommend for external drives are: G-Tech, OWC and LaCie.



    Right now I have 3 LaCie drives and one OWC drive hooked up to my 17" MacBook Pro.



    The drive I want is a SeriTek 2EN2 (a SATA dual external hard drive enclosure) with two Seagate Barracuda 320 GB drives (and a SeriTek 1SM2 PC Card to connect it to may MacBook pro).
  • Reply 3 of 10
    philbyphilby Posts: 124member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Galley View Post


    The 500GB Western Digital My Book Pro has USB 2.0, FW400 and FW800 for $229 from Amazon, (...)



    I use the same drive here: very nice indeed. It had two disconnects while sleeping in the first two days, but this problem now seems to have vanished, even though I uninstalled all the WD drivers and background apps.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    I would highly recommend the G-Tech G-Drive Q. It has fanless cooling, which is pretty much just a big heat sink on the bottom. It has USB 2.0, Firewire 400/800 and eSATA. It is a little bit pricier then a similar sized drive by LaCie or Western Digital but I found it for $319.95 from Apple. I like this drive over other similar drives because it a single drive rather then a RAID 0 setup (which if you don't know, means that two separate disks are in a single enclosure and the data gets spread out between these two drives and therefore if one drive crashes, all data between two is lost.) Overall, I would recommend this drive to just about anyone.



    http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVEQ.cfm
  • Reply 5 of 10
    galleygalley Posts: 971member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by snowboarder389 View Post


    I would highly recommend the G-Tech G-Drive Q. It has fanless cooling, which is pretty much just a big heat sink on the bottom. It has USB 2.0, Firewire 400/800 and eSATA. It is a little bit pricier then a similar sized drive by LaCie or Western Digital but I found it for $319.95 from Apple. I like this drive over other similar drives because it a single drive rather then a RAID 0 setup (which if you don't know, means that two separate disks are in a single enclosure and the data gets spread out between these two drives and therefore if one drive crashes, all data between two is lost.) Overall, I would recommend this drive to just about anyone.



    http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVEQ.cfm



    That's actually a pretty good price for a 500 gigger. G-Tech makes great stuff.
  • Reply 6 of 10
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Galley View Post


    The 500GB Western Digital My Book Pro has USB 2.0, FW400 and FW800 for $229 from Amazon, and a 3-year warranty. The case is the same color as the MacBook Pro.



    This man speaks the truth. I got mine for 135 but that was from another person...
  • Reply 8 of 10
    I'm looking into having a backup hard drive for a MBP I think I'm gonna get after leopards release. After looking into acouple 500 gig hard drives, I saw some comments about them NTFS formatting into 465 usable gigs. Does the HFS+ used by mac's make any difference in the usable amount of space?
  • Reply 9 of 10
    mrtotesmrtotes Posts: 760member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by philby View Post


    I use the same drive here: very nice indeed. It had two disconnects while sleeping in the first two days, but this problem now seems to have vanished, even though I uninstalled all the WD drivers and background apps.



    Fourth vote for the MyBook Pro 500Gb here.



    However if I were buying a drive specifically for a MBP I'd probably go for a Lacie Little Big Disk as it's bus powered, FW800 and includes up to a pair of 160Gb drives that it stripes data across (so much faster than normal 2.5" drive performance.)



    mrtotes
  • Reply 10 of 10
    mrtotesmrtotes Posts: 760member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by OzzieTheOWl View Post


    I'm looking into having a backup hard drive for a MBP I think I'm gonna get after leopards release. After looking into acouple 500 gig hard drives, I saw some comments about them NTFS formatting into 465 usable gigs. Does the HFS+ used by mac's make any difference in the usable amount of space?





    Hard drives are sold in decimal notation i.e. 500Gb but drives save data in binary format. This leads to a difference. For Gb the conversion calulation is:



    (500 x (1000^3) ) / (1024^3) = 465.66Gb



    This fact applies to all drives and means my iMac G4's hard disk is 298Gb versus 320Gb, iPod Nano is 1.86Gb vs 2Gb etc etc.



    There is then a small overhead for the formatting on top of that but not a great deal of difference between the formats.
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