external hard drive general questions

L

lujhu

Registered
I need to get an external hard drive so I can do a back up before upgrading to tiger.

1) Is it worth it to get a firewire drive or will USB be fine?
2) I'm pretty new with a mac...how exactly do I back everything up? I'd like to make it bootable, but the most important stuff (obviously) is my data.

thanks,
m
 
lujhu said:
2) I'm pretty new with a mac...how exactly do I back everything up? I'd like to make it bootable, but the most important stuff (obviously) is my data.
Click to expand...

Firewire is the answer. Even firewire 400 is better than USB 2.0 on all dimensions except for burst speed--which doesn't matter. And, you will need a firewire drive if you want to boot from your external. Most, but not all, firewire drives are bootable. So, be sure you buy one that is bootable. If you want a firewire 400, my favorite is the LaCie Porsche design 250 GB (much bang for the buck). After getting your firewire external, you would want to format it Mac extended (journaled), partition it, and clone your internal to one of its partitions. I would use Disk Utility to format, partition, and clone your internal if you want to keep things simple. Others will recommend other software for these tasks. Disk utility does all these tasks very competently, but other software will do more.
 
Yes firewire for sure, Lacie has nice FW800 drives which come bundled with backup software.. also maxtor has firewire drives with one button backup utility, should check those out if you like easy backups.. If youre subscribe to .mac you have the backup utility from there.. Anyway most backup programs let you select what to backup and when.
I have lacies 250gb FW800 and its great, much faster than fw400 so thats what I´d recommend.

tomi
 
Get whichever ATA HD that takes your fancy. Optimal now is 200Gb with 8mb cache, I prefer Seagate Barracudas, after a techie told me how many Western Digitals and Maxtors just die.

Look for a quality case. Expensive does not necessarily mean good. My best cost me the least. Look at the materials, get metal with ample ventilation space or a fan, at least 2 FW ports maybe even USB. Look at the industrial design, finish, supplied instructions, packaging and cable. The rough, badly made ones are pretty obvious.

5 minutes with a screw driver and you have a new external HD for usually a third less than the Apple store models.

btw Apple has had a spotty record with FireWire Hard Drives. They run slower on the Mac than on Windows and at least 2 versions of OSX 10.3 have caused FW drive failures. Tiger advises they be turned off on startup.

Oh and there is a paradox with FireWire in that Apple advises it is safer to have them off on start-up yet says they can be made bootable. Haven't got my head around that one yet.
 
lujhu said:
1) Is it worth it to get a firewire drive or will USB be fine?
2) I'm pretty new with a mac...how exactly do I back everything up? I'd like to make it bootable, but the most important stuff (obviously) is my data.
Click to expand...

We don't know what kind of Mac you have. You will get no benefit from a firewire 800 if you don't have a firewire 800 port. Also, if you build your own drive, then be sure that the enclosure you choose supports booting.

Apple "insists" that firewire drives should be disconnected when installing/updating one's system unless, of course, one is doing so on the firewire drive, itself. Problems connecting to firewire drives have arisen when their firmware has not been up to date when installing/updating and when they have been connected when installing/updating. I would not let these rare problems disuade me from getting a firewire drive; there are too many benefits from them to do anything else. There is no problem in starting a Mac up with a firewire drive connected or starting up from a firewire drive. Firewires work very well and are very fast on Macs.
 
Just a note, The Ghost recommended Lacie drives, which i agree with (mine have been fine anyway), but i wouldn't recommend buying their Porsche designed drives. Both from advice here, and from experience of at least 2 friends, these drives seem to fail very quickly, causing all sorts of stress. I'd stick to their d2 drives instead.
 
I have to agree with Ora, Lacie's D2 versions are a much better drive than the cheaper Porsche versions. I can't see trusting my important data to anything less.

Building your own external drive is doable, but not always worth it IMO. Sure you can do it cheaper than buying a prebuilt version, but you also open yourself up to a world of possible problems. It's a gamble sometimes.

Seagate offers a 'one-touch backup' drive like the Maxtor one. It would be a much better choice than Maxtor's version. I would never recommend a Maxtor drive to anyone. However, the Lacie drive is pretty close to it price-wise so I'd rather have the Lacie drive.

As far as software goes, Disk Utility is more than capable. If you want a 3rd party app, then Carbon Copy Cloner might be something worth looking into.
 
Building your own external drive is doable, but not always worth it IMO. Sure you can do it cheaper than buying a prebuilt version, but you also open yourself up to a world of possible problems. It's a gamble sometimes.
Click to expand...

Hardly. How helpless can you be? A few screws and 2 plugs? What do you think many of the stores do when they sell you the drive in the case? Just they charge you for it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top