# What kind of external drive should I buy?



## RonaldMacDonald (Apr 28, 2009)

I recently got an Intel Mac and am new to Time Machine.  Would I be better off backing up to an external drive?  Should I get a USB drive or a firewire drive?  I do not feel the need for a wireless drive. I want a drive that is quiet but fast.  I only have about 100 gigs of data including system software.  My data does not grow very fast so if I left Time Machine on, and had an external drive around 600 GB, how long do you that that would last me?  

The object is to store my data throughout time (like a time machine should be).


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Apr 28, 2009)

I have fallen in love with the Western Digital Elements 1TB drives -- they're fast enough, good looking, rugged, quiet, and, apparently, energy-saving to boot.

Not to mention they can be had for right around $100.

Using FireWire would be the fastest, but Time Machine is more about transparency than speed.  Once your initial backup (~100GB) is done (which could take a few hours), then incremental backups will be transparent and relatively quick.

Yes, you should use an external drive, in my opinion.

Time Machine will use all available space on the backup drive, until it reaches capacity.  At that point, Time Machine will simply delete the oldest backup(s), freeing up space for a new backup.  The larger the Time Machine hard drive, the farther back in time you can go.  A bigger hard drive will simply store a longer time period of backups.

Let's give an example: I have in my MacBook a 250GB internal hard drive.  I am using approximately 70GB of that space currently.  I have a 250GB external USB hard drive that is my Time Machine hard drive.  My oldest backup is from September of 2008, so I have about 8 months worth of backups -- I can retrieve a file that is, at most, 8 months old if I need to.

If I fill my hard drive to, say, 150GB, then I will probably not be able to go back in time 8 months -- maybe 6 or 7 months.

The time period you can "go back" into also depends on how much the data on your hard drive changes, too, and what the size of that data is.  If I make a lot of changes to large files very frequently, then the amount of time in my backups gets smaller.  If I only dabble in small Word documents, then I can store more, since the size and frequency of the backups is smaller.


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## RonaldMacDonald (Apr 28, 2009)

Instead of deleting the oldest backups, can you manually delete a backup in between time (just to free up space)?  Quite often, the oldest backup is what you want. By the way ElDiabloConCaca, Fusion says that if you want to create a virtual from an physical Win machine, it recommends a USB2 drive.  Could it be done with a firewire drive instead?

I clicked the Thank You button, but I wish to thank you again!


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## Randy Singer (Apr 28, 2009)

Seagate drives have had  problems lately:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9126280

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

http://ahwuvar.notlong.com

Western Digital drives were never the best, and now they have horrible support to go along with this:
*No* WD drives are supported for use as boot drives???
http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=11152

I recommended that you only purchase internal mechanisms of known quality and install them in an external case kit yourself.  (This is a dead easy process.)   I recommend a Hitachi mechanism, especially an "enterprise class" one.  Hitachi has been known for the highest quality drives for years, and it has been ages since they had a bad batch of drives.

It is also a good idea to purchase a case kit that has both a USB and a FireWire port, so if one interface goes bad, you can try the other.

Hitachi enterprise class drives
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A38028/
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/Hitachi+SATA+3.5+Hard+Drive

Case kits:

Macally G-S350SUA Hi-Speed eSATA/FireWire/USB2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure for 3.5-Inch SATA HDD
$39
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000P1NAMO/ref=asc_df_B000P1NAMO694392?smid=A2YLYLTN75J8LR

$40
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817347017


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## Mattbook (Apr 28, 2009)

Ive been using Rockstor drive enclosures for a while with seagate drives..

The ones I use most often are the single 3.5" Rockpro 850, Solid product with a built in power supply, no freakin brick to wory about..

http://www.rocstor.com/Products/rocpro-850.html

And my own personal vault is a Rocraid 2UB

http://www.rocstor.com/Products/rocraid-2ub.html

There not cheap but solid... Ive replaced so many cheap enclosures..


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

Mattbook said:


> Ive been using Rockstor drive enclosures for a while with seagate drives..
> 
> The ones I use most often are the single 3.5" Rockpro 850, Solid product with a built in power supply, no freakin brick to wory about..



I usually prefer external hard drive enclosures with an external power supply.  Heat is the natural enemy of magnetic media. An external power supply means that the drive mechanism is not subjected to a lot of heat.


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## ora (Apr 29, 2009)

Randy Singer said:


> I recommended that you only purchase internal mechanisms of known quality and install them in an external case kit yourself. (This is a dead easy process.)



I entirely agree, I have given up on prepackaged external HDs. You pay as much or at least not much more to buil;d it yourself but you know what you are getting. For instance i have a bunch of Lacie d2 drives from past years and they are all different drives inside, some good some pretty poor.



> I recommend a Hitachi mechanism, especially an "enterprise class" one.  Hitachi has been known for the highest quality drives for years, and it has been ages since they had a bad batch of drives.



Wow, totally different to my experience and what I have heard,  I have avoided Hitachi drives like the plague. 

Your info on WD is also incomplete- from reading all of the page you link it appears that WD mybook drives will not boot PPC drives, and that WD have issued a statement saying you should not boot mac from external WD drives, but not that it will never work. To be honest I am agaisnt booting from external drives for more than emergency situations anyway. Anyway, saying no WD drive can be booted from is innaccurate, i have a WD boot drive in my laptop as we speak 

Also while Seagate clearly have some issues in general they are high class units. I have several _very_ long serving seagates drives despite abusing them in aeroplane hold luggage etc.

Me, I like the Samsung Spinpoint drives at the moment, I have several and they perform very well, plus are very quiet for the price and performance, which is an issue for many people.

PS - Randy, looking at the Macintosh Bible 6th edition cover at http://www.amazon.com/Macintosh-Bible-6th-Jeremy-Judson/dp/0201886367 (click the cover for a closeup folks) I cannot see your name.


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

ora said:


> Your info on WD is also incomplete- from reading all of the page you link it appears that WD mybook drives will not boot PPC drives, and that WD have issued a statement saying you should not boot mac from external WD drives, but not that it will never work. To be honest I am agaisnt booting from external drives for more than emergency situations anyway. Anyway, saying no WD drive can be booted from is innaccurate, i have a WD boot drive in my laptop as we speak



You are putting words in my mouth.  Read what I said.  I said that WD does not *support* booting from any of their drives.  They may indeed be bootable, but in my mind if a hard drive company can't support booting any of its drives it is a recognition by them that their products are sub-par.

WD is an extremely non-consumer friendly company:
For instance, Western Digital has decided to include software on their external storage drives that 
restricts them from being used for network file sharing.
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/12/western_digital_blocks_nas_fro.php
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204702710
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/western-digital.html
This can be worked around, and is mostly irrelevant to Mac users, but it shows what sort of company one is dealing with.

As for Hitachi drives, I've provided links for recent widespread problems with Seagate drives.  Can you provide links that reference widespread problems with Hitachi drives?  I haven't heard of any.  

Hitachi's enterprise-class drives are designed to be a cut above ordinary consumer hard drives.


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

ora said:


> PS - Randy, looking at the Macintosh Bible 6th edition cover at http://www.amazon.com/Macintosh-Bible-6th-Jeremy-Judson/dp/0201886367 (click the cover for a closeup folks) I cannot see your name.


The names on the cover of TMB are, and have always been, the *editors*.  I've never been an editor.

The names of the authors of TMB were usually at the beginning of each chapter, and each section within a chapter had the initials of the contributing author(s) to that section on them.

TMB always did things in an unconventional way.  Unfortunately when Goldstein & Blair sold TMB to Peachpit, and then later Peachpit was purchased by Pearson, TMB began a precipitous slide into mediocrity, and it is now defunct.


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## RonaldMacDonald (Apr 29, 2009)

Randy,

Can you provide any links to instructions on how to put it altogether?  Internal drive, case enclosure, power supply, ports, and software to drive it???


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Apr 29, 2009)

Well, that's a few more steps than necessary.  Pretty much the only step you need is "put drive in case."  The external cabling (i.e., hooking the drive up to your computer) will be self-explanatory, and the power supply will either already be inside the drive or included as an external brick.  Beyond that, connect to computer -- power on -- and Mac OS X will ask you if you wish to format the drive.  If it doesn't, you can use Disk Utility to reformat the drive.  No software to install, period.

Also, just to provide a differing point of view, Google ran a 5-year study that found no conclusive links with heat and high utilization affecting the lifespan of a hard drive:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/022607-google-disk-drives.html?nwwpkg=alphadoggs


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## ora (Apr 29, 2009)

Randy Singer said:


> You are putting words in my mouth.  Read what I said.  I said that WD does not *support* booting from any of their drives.  They may indeed be bootable, but in my mind if a hard drive company can't support booting any of its drives it is a recognition by them that their products are sub-par.



No I am not. You said that WD does not support booting on *any* of their drives. The page you linked says they do not support booting on *external* drives. 

This is also what I found on the WD site at http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1059


> While it may be possible to boot your computer to an external hard drive, Western Digital does not provide technical support for booting your computer using an external hard drive. If you intend to make a copy of your boot drive, or install your operating system, please use a second internal drive (EIDE or Serial ATA), rather than an external drive.



Personally I suspect this is legal posterior-covering. They do not want to provide tech support for every person trying to boot from inappropriate external drives. I think it says a less lot than you seem to think about the quality of the drives themselves



Randy Singer said:


> WD is an extremely non-consumer friendly company:
> For instance, Western Digital has decided to include software on their external storage drives that
> restricts them from being used for network file sharing.
> http://www.gearlog.com/2007/12/western_digital_blocks_nas_fro.php
> ...



You link to several articles about the famous NAS lock-down. This is about the packaged external drive not the quality fo the disk contained within. Apple stops you playing HD iTunes content on non-approved external monitors, Vista was apparently lowering its rez overall when certain non drm files were played. All sorts of companies put silly limitations in their products but they are easy to bypass. This issue is separate from hardware quality



Randy Singer said:


> As for Hitachi drives, I've provided links for recent widespread problems with Seagate drives.  Can you provide links that reference widespread problems with Hitachi drives?  I haven't heard of any. [/QUOTE[
> 
> My avoidance of Hitachi drives runs back to the 'DeathStar' products they bought from IBM, I had the misfortune to have two of them fail on me. While this was back in the dim past, the general impression it left of Hitachi was poor.
> 
> ...


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

RonaldMacDonald said:


> Randy,
> 
> Can you provide any links to instructions on how to put it altogether?  Internal drive, case enclosure, power supply, ports, and software to drive it???



Putting an internal drive mechanism into an external case kit is child's play. The case kit comes mostly pre-assembled. Usually there are only four steps total to put it together.  Assembly requires nothing more than a phillips screwdriver to screw in maybe one or two screws.  The screws attach the raw hard drive to a sled.  You then plug in two wiring harnesses that are already in place, and which have keyed sockets (so you can't do it wrong).  One for the data cables and one for the power cables.  The sled slides into the case and snaps into place with no tools required.  You are then done.

To format the drive, you use Disk Utility, which is part of OS X and in your Utlities folder.  In the Bombich Forums is an excellent post on how to properly prepare your external HD before you use it:
http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=4084


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

ora said:


> My avoidance of Hitachi drives runs back to the 'DeathStar' products they bought from IBM, I had the misfortune to have two of them fail on me. While this was back in the dim past, the general impression it left of Hitachi was poor.



I understand the concept of "once burned, twice shy."  In fact, I can't think of a major brand of hard drive that some time in the past 20 years did not have a bad batch of drives with a high failure rate.

However, as you said, and as I said in my original post, it has been a very long time since Hitachi had a bad batch, and I'm not sure that they have had one since Hitachi took over IBM's hard drive business.  That's a good track record in the hard drive business.



ora said:


> I guess this is as reasonable as saying all Seagate drives are bad because of one set of drives that fail, or in the Seagate case had a firmware issue.



Until recently I used to recommend Seagate drives.  I have an office full of them.  However, there have been a large number of problems with them as of late, which is easy to find out about with a quick Google search.  I can't in good conscience recommend them just now.  Especially when there are brands without such issues.  



ora said:


> Among my many tech-fanatic friends Seagate and WD seem the drives of choice and anecdotally the most reliable. Add to this I work in distributed computing and hang our with people that run data centres. They seem to favour both WD and Seagate drives as well (for petabyte-scale storage) and they are people I trust.



Well, let's see...I'm the head of what is probably currently the world's largest Mac user group: MacAttorney, with well over 7,000 members.  I'm on about a dozen discussion lists, each with at least a thousand users.  I follow all of the Macintosh news sites daily.  There may be people in the Macintosh world who are more in touch with what is going on with average Mac users right up to this minute, but I'm not sure where you would find them.  That may mean nothing to you, but one or two folks respect my knowledge and opinion.  I'm happy to share what I know with those who are interested.


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## ora (Apr 29, 2009)

1: Hitachi/Seagate wise - as I said I had a bad reaction to Hitachi drives, but had never read/heard anything good about them since. Seagate are a top flight manufacturer with an admitted problem with some of their current drives, you gave the impression Seagate=bad. I disagreed

2: You didn't address the WD issue I mentioned, and you were being inaccurate, in a way that was frankly a bit FUDish.  In fact you didn't respond to the "Hitachi enterprise is designed to be awesome therefore is awesome" point either, or in fact anything where I might have been slightly correct. 

3: You are a super-mac man, yadda yada, you probably wrote some of a reasonably well known book years back in OS9 days. I _can_  point to people more expert (looks at Fryke, EDCC, Gia, Satcommer, others here, misses BobW yet again and wonders where Arden went). Your group has 7000 members, it appears to be a mailing list, macosx.com has 126,000 members (of which I am but one), I guess that makes it a bigger group.

4. I also was talking about drive quality NOT mac issues. Drive quality is independent of operating system. It doesn't matter how Mac expert you are, it matter how hardware expert you are. I am not a hardware guru, but my job it to spend time with hardware and software gurus and I try and share some of that knowledge here through the boards and tech support system.

5. You are right, I don't respect your opinion at this stage. I disagreed with you in what I hoped was a fairly friendly way at first (see the smiley - great things for signaling friendliness). I said you were inaccurate, and you were! You responded abrasively and I (probably inadvisedly) responded in kind, days that start with 3.5 hour phone conferences will do that to a man. I am going to make use of the ignore function (bless it) and I advise you to do the same!

And to the OP who has probably had to read all this, I would take all quality opinions here with a grain of salt, mine included, as you can see there is no consensus on what drives are the best! 

EDIT - 

Damn, picture won't embed so you will just have to click it!


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

ora said:


> 2: You didn't address...



I'm not interested in personally catering to the whims of a rude ego-involved troll who twists what I have to say.

I've tried to help others here who have questions, I'm happy to let them judge what I have to say for themselves.

Moderators...please step in.  I'm shocked at how inhospitable this list has become.


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Apr 29, 2009)

Randy Singer said:


> Well, let's see...I'm the head of what is probably currently the world's largest Mac user group: MacAttorney, with well over 7,000 members.  I'm on about a dozen discussion lists, each with at least a thousand users.  I follow all of the Macintosh news sites daily.  There may be people in the Macintosh world who are more in touch with what is going on with average Mac users right up to this minute, but I'm not sure where you would find them.  That may mean nothing to you, but one or two folks respect my knowledge and opinion.  I'm happy to share what I know with those who are interested.


Following this logic, I'm sure you agree, then, that octo-mom, having more children than most, would be an expert in good mothering skills, yes?

Sorry, I had to... 

"He who dies with the most toys, wins." -- but, you're not dead yet, so having more of something while you're living means, and only means, that you were able to amass more of something that others.  How that came to be is debatable.

Just to keep this on-subject, though: I still back up my recommendation for Western Digital drives.  I know that everyone's mileage varies with respect to brand of hard drive, and that hard drive quality goes up and down for each company over time.

Still, Western Digitals get good to great overall customer reviews (with, of course, a sprinkle of bad reviews, but that's true for anything) on sites like newegg.com, tigerdirect.com, amazon.com, etc.  Not to mention that their offerings are inexpensive compared to other options -- I assumed, the original poster being an average consumer and all, that a good balance of price vs. function would best suit their needs.  I assumed that they were not in need of a higher-cost "enterprise"-level drive in a more expensive USB-FireWire combo enclosure.  Roughly pricing that puts the cost over $150 (possibly even $200) when all along there's a whole terabyte of reasonably efficient and quality space available from Western Digital for around $100, give or take.

Now, if we're pricing out the absolute _best_ drive to put in the absolute _best_ external enclosure, then that's a different ball game... but for the price of those WD 1TB drives, my opinion stands that they make excellent consumer-level drives useful for everything from storage of media files to Time Machine backups.

Here's one link to the drive I'm talking about, along with over 200 customer reviews, all mostly positive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136321&Tpk=wd elements 1tb

If you shop around (buy.com is where I got my last two because they were having a special), that drive can be had cheaper, but at newegg, you get free shipping, so the end cost kind of balances out overall.


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## Randy Singer (Apr 29, 2009)

ElDiabloConCaca said:


> Still, Western Digitals get good to great overall customer reviews...




http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/topic3970.html


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Apr 29, 2009)

I see a lot of good reviews of Western Digital drives in that link you posted... I don't know whether it was your intention or not to show me good reviews, but that's what I see there.

I also see some negative reviews -- but then again, that's akin to coming to this site, reading the many threads about Mac problems, and deducing that Macs are prone to problems... even though this place disproportionately represents the number of Mac problems vs. the entire universe of Mac computers and peoples' experiences with them... it's a place _for mainly problems_, so we'll see more problem threads here than threads exclaiming "My Mac works perfectly!  Just wanted to stop in and say I have no use for this forum!"

This forum does not accurately represent the proportion of problem Macs vs. perfectly-working Macs, just as Macintouch's reader reports do not accurately represent the number of problem WD drives vs. perfectly-working WD drives.


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## RonaldMacDonald (Apr 30, 2009)

I am the OP.  This thread must have brought be some bad luck as my LeCie just went nuts.  The drive is about 4 years old but I hardly even used it.  I made some backups of my old G4's and just kept it all these years.  As I recently bought a intel mac I thought I would backup some of my files (not the system stuff, just the stuff I work on).  I booted the drive for the first time and it was working for a while.  Then it just quite working.

I then tried to mount it on a G4 and it made the G4 act weird.  Could not even launch disk utility. I can hear the drive but it just won't cooperate.  Any ideas?  I do not know the model  number as it is not written on the case anywhere.  160GB.

If I can't fix the thing, can I at least use the case and enclose an internal drive?


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## ora (Apr 30, 2009)

Is it making a clicking noise? One of the known faults of the Lacie drives is the power system failing which makes the drives click (in much the same way they do when the drives catastrophically fail, irritatingly). I have actually had the same effect when I used the wrong power supply with the wrong drive, it clicked a lot but never finished mounting.

If there is this loud clicking then in might actually be a case fault in which would mean the drive may even be fine but it is not work reusing the case.

If you don't get this noise it probably is the drive, and in that case yes it may well be worth reusing the case with a different internal drive (I won't even start to suggest a brand!  ). I have done this with their d2 case drives before with no issues. They opened fine, i think the only difference to using a bought enclosure was i had to pull one strip of foam off the side of the case that was glued on in order to access one of the mounting screws, but it was obvious what needed to happen.


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## RonaldMacDonald (Apr 30, 2009)

I don't think there is loud clicking. I'll have to check again but it isn't loud.  Sometimes the blue light is on constantly and sometimes it blinks.  The drive I have looks like this:

http://www.lacie.com/jpen/products/product.htm?pid=10894

If it is the drive itself, am I SOL?


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## ora (Apr 30, 2009)

The clicking from the bad power supply (or catastrophically failed drive) is very noticeable, a lot more than normal 'drive in use' noise. Sounds like this is not the issue.

That said in terms of what is on the disk the news probably isn't great. When you say it stops working on the new intel mac, what does that exactly mean? It disappears from the finder? Does System Profiler see it? (This is in Applications/Utilities, open it then select USB or firewire form the list on the left depending on how you attached the drive). You say it stops Disk Utility launching on the G4 but can you run DU  disk repair on it from the intel?

By the way that is the d2 case I several some of, and like I said, assuming the power supply isn't the issue (which it probably isn't) then you can use that case with a different internal drive. They are very easy to take apart with a small Philips screwdriver.


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## RonaldMacDonald (May 4, 2009)

I thought I would try it again. I have tried hooking up the external drive to a G4 only to find the G4 will not even finish start-up.  It gets to the point where it is supposed to load local disks and stops.  Then if I pull out the firewire that connects the external drive, it finishes start-up.  There are no unusal noises.  It sounds like the drive is working like it always does.

I opened the LaCie case and find that the drive inside is, behold, a Western Digital.  A WD1600.


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## ElDiabloConCaca (May 4, 2009)

LaCie drives have been known to have bad power supply assemblies -- either internal to the drive casing or with the power cord/brick itself.

A good way to check whether or not the drive inside the enclosure is the culprit is to remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it up inside of your G4 (or other Mac tower machine) via IDE or SATA (depending on what the drive is).  If the drive works as an internal drive (which is what I'm suspecting will happen), then that points to some problem with the enclosure itself.


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## RonaldMacDonald (May 4, 2009)

The drive is IDE.  Today I went to the store and found an external drive I liked as it has a removeable drive.  It only accepts SATA drives.  But at least I can buy any SATA drive I want and just insert it.  Cost me $138.  It came with, you guessed it, a Western Digital drive (1TB).  What I like is that I can buy any SATA drives and swap them so that I can take one home in case of fire, theft, etc.  Speaking of theft, is there a simple way to password protect my sensitive stuff?  It would be cool if there was a function in Time Machine (my next project).


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## Satcomer (May 4, 2009)

Did you take a look at the OWC Enclosure Kits yet?


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## RonaldMacDonald (May 4, 2009)

Satcomer, that certainly is a very interesting link.  I live in Japan and out in the country for that matter.  Although I sometimes import stuff from the U.S. (where most prices are cheaper), it can really be a pain to buy stuff.  When some company ships me the wrong item, exchanging it can be a real pain.

The enclosure I just bought does the job and lets me change the drive as easy as inserting a floppy.  I will be able to keep backups offsite. I will also try out different brands of SATA drives.  I guess you can say I am satisfied.  The only thing I would like to know at this point is how to password protect my drive or at least some of the sensitive directories in the event that a drive gets stolen. 

Thanks to all who contributed to this thread.  I really love this board.


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## RonaldMacDonald (Jun 1, 2009)

ElDiabloConCaca said:


> LaCie drives have been known to have bad power supply assemblies -- either internal to the drive casing or with the power cord/brick itself.
> 
> A good way to check whether or not the drive inside the enclosure is the culprit is to remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it up inside of your G4 (or other Mac tower machine) via IDE or SATA (depending on what the drive is).  If the drive works as an internal drive (which is what I'm suspecting will happen), then that points to some problem with the enclosure itself.



I finally got around to doing what you suggested.  Not sure I did it correctly though.  I opened the tower and removed the carriage that holds the drive.  I did not take out the drive that came with the Mac.  I just connected the IDE drive to the other connectors that were in there.  It was a perfect fit.  I assumed and I may have assumed wrong, that the machine could the be turned on with two internal drives hooked up at the same time.  

When I turned on the machine I got a flashing question mark inside a small rectangular box. Is this because the drive I installed was no good or because I should have disconnected the other drive first?  But since the drive carriage holds two drives, I assume that the machine was made to run with two drives if you wanted to do so.  So should I assume the drive was bad after all???  

I so, that would mean my La Cie external case is OK?  If so, could I put a TB drive in it even though it came with a 160 MB drive to begin with?


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Jun 1, 2009)

On IDE drives, if you have more than one IDE drive on a single bus (i.e., ribbon cable), then you must ensure that the drives are "jumpered" correctly -- one as "master" and the other as "slave" (or in some later configurations, both jumpered "cs" or "cable select").

It's likely that the drive in the enclosure is jumpered as "master", and the drive inside the computer also as "master."  This won't work -- jumper the drive in the enclosure as "slave" when connecting it internally, and "master" when you put it back in the enclosure.


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## RonaldMacDonald (Jun 1, 2009)

How do I jumper one as the slave?


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Jun 1, 2009)

It's different for every drive, but typically, you'll find the jumpers next to the IDE/SATA connector and the power connector on the drive.  Sometimes on the drive sticker there'll be a diagram of how to place a jumper for different modes -- master, slave, cable select, etc.

Drives usually come with at least one jumper (a small, cubic plastic thingy) that is placed over two jumper pins vertically.  See if the drive has one already; if not, you'll need to get one.


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## chevy (Jun 1, 2009)

I use WD because they have the lowest noise on the market.

And reliability is not a key issue here as this disk is used much less often than your system disk and the odds that you will need it are low, therefore the odds it is dead when you need it are extremely low. If you have only one reliable disk, use it for your system.


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