External hard drive recommendation please...

Hi there,

I need to buy an external drive to back up my mac and photos.

been looking at these Lacie drives...

clicky

anyone use one, or have recommendations for any others.

I dont have experience of that particular model but my experience of Lacie in general has been very positive.

Mattmatic uses Lacie drives if you send him a PM I'm sure he could help you, I use Maxtor drives myself from here www.ebuyer.co.uk

Any Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi or Samsung disk drive from www.scan.co.uk, and an enclosure. Put the two together yourself easily with a screwdriver.

3.5" drives are cheaper per GB, but 2.5" are more portable and can run off USB power.

I did that the first time round and it was OK but then I bought a Seagate One Touch which run more quietly and then a dirt cheap Maxtor Free Agent from Jessops at 30 quid for 500 gig which can't be bad.

Personally I'd buy the packaged ones in future as they do seem neater, quieter and better packaged. I'd like to say they're faster but I doubt that they are.

Mike

I've got two Cooler Master Xcraft enclosures that are quiet, because they don't need an internal fan. Usually £25 from Computer Fairs £35 PC World. You don't even need a screwdriver with these completely toolless.

One big advantage of a seperate enclosure is that you can Clone your existing HD to it and should something go wrong just swap HDs. Just use the free XXCOPY program and put
XXCOPY C: J: /CLONE (J: being your USB Box)
in a batch file and run it say once a week to keep the clone up to date. I've just done that to swap HDs, but had 4 batch files one for each partition.

shim

I know cheap special offers can be found for ready-made products, but they won't necessarily have such a reliable disk as you could buy yourself separately for not very much more money. Maxtor don't seem to have such a good reputation now as Seagate and Western Digital, for example.

Noise is usually almost nill with a fanless enclosure.

They'll be little difference in speed between one modern drive/enclosure and another when using a USB or Firewire connection, because your computer's USB/Firewire port runs more slowly than the drive - it's the bottleneck.

You can't actually buy a poor quality hard disk mechanism, the only differences are access speeds these days. Given that data transfer is crippled by the relative slowness of USB, it doesn't really matter what the mechanism inside is.

As for the outside part, I have a soft spot for the Western Digital MyBook range, as they stand upright (like a Book!) and take up less space than most.

If opting for a small unit containing a 2.5" hard disk (laptop size) bear in mind that although perfectly good, they are much more fragile than a 3.5" device. In other words, you stand less chance of it surviving being dropped on the floor (not that you'd intend to, of course!) The upside of small devices, as mentioned previously, is they don't require an external power supply.

I use both types, a Mybook 500gig unit, and a tiny non-branded 2.5" device with a 200gig drive in it.

Speed-wise, eSATA will be hands-down the fastest data transfer followed a long way behind by USB2.

Why that one and why Jigsaw?

Does your Mac have enough USB power to run that on one port?

I get the impression you are buying on price. Otherwise I would suggest 250GB might be a bit small for backing up pics. Also do you only want USB or do you want FW as well?

It might be worth having a look at Dabs and Expansys sites (and others) as you may get a better price on that model or greater capacity for the same price. Both the sites I mention let you filter search results and display by price or whatever.

I have used LaCie desktop and mobile and Formac mobile and have been happy with them.

Some 2.5" enclosures are fairly chunky and just as robust as typical 3.5" enclosures, and 2.5" disks are designed for laptops that get bumped around - so I would expect them to be more likely to survive dropping, not less.

Don't waste money on the WorldBook version, lets you access anything from anywhere in the World as long as it isn't videos, pictures mp3's etc.
You can access text files OK

Seagate did a drive using the fast eSata2 which was at least twice as fast as USB2 (they claim 5 times)and they gave the controller card away with the drive. The controller card actually costs about the same as the drive. One (500gb) on ebay for £68 here

shim

Hi Petermac, I am using a Western Digital 1 Terabit drive for the same purpose, very fast and realiable ...so far best regards Ron

Just to add my 2p's worth - I tend to avoid any storage solutions by Maxtor these days as every singe hard drive that I, my father in law and brother in law have had that died on them have always been Maxtor one's (though I bet there are people here that have had nothing but great experience with them) I just cant ingore those statistics really.

I use WesternDigital Essential (500GB), USB. Good value for money, it has a metal case (with some rubber-like edges) so it disperse heat quite well, it's not too noisy.

1Tb Western Digital Mybook is my (latest) choice. I use it to backup a 1Tb Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ system.