What kind of external drive should I buy?

[RonaldMacDonald]

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).

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

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.

 

[RonaldMacDonald]

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!

 

[Randy Singer]

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

 

[Mattbook]

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..

 

[Randy Singer]

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.

 

[ora]

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.

 

[Randy Singer]

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.

 

[Randy Singer]

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.

 

[RonaldMacDonald]

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???

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

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

 

[ora]

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Somehow I suspect WD RE drives and Seagate Barracuda ES drives are designed in the same way. If you are saying Enterprise>consumer that is different to Hitachi>Seagate and WD.


RE the macintosh bible - It is my deeply cynical nature that makes me investigate claims in people signatures in part because I am interested in the impression those claims are meant to cause (I am fascinated by online social structures). As it happens I could find no ref online to your authorship of TMB, other than on sites where you appeared to have provided the info. I did find you Mac legal office book on Amazon though.

Lastly and back on Topic, (and EDCC beat me to the punch so I just echo his advice), assembling external drives is extremely easy, just ensure the enclosure and drive match (as in both SATA or both IDE/PATA) and have a small Phillip's screwdriver for the drive mounting screws. There is only one way it will plug together and it fairly obvious

 

[Randy Singer]

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

 

[Randy Singer]

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.

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.

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.

 

[ora]

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!

 

[Randy Singer]

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.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

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.

 

[Randy Singer]

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

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

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

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.

 

[RonaldMacDonald]

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?