external hard drives?

nrois02 · Apr 22, 2009

so i was going to get an external hard drive for my macbook pro to back all my photos up. and i was going to get a seagate but after reading some negative reviews im thinking not. so does anyone know of a good, fair priced, good quality, not going to give me any problems external hard drives?

i also am looking for one that is 500gb or 1tb. thanks

droyz2000 · Apr 22, 2009

Western Digital drives are kind of the standard. You might also want to look into a Drobo.

prodigy2k7 · Apr 23, 2009

Western Digital is thee best

Edit: Go to western digital's site, its good for specs and different options, and viewing different models...etc

PatrickHMS · Apr 23, 2009

I used to build and support PC's for a living.

You cannot beat Seagate or Western Digital for a high quality hard drive.

Back your files and photographs up...

Please back your files and photographs up...

P - L - E - A - S - E back your files and photographs up!

usayit · Apr 23, 2009

LaCie externals are very popular in the Mac world. They worked closely with Apple to insure their firewire interfaces work well with Macs. (I have a Western Digital firewire external that refuses to allow my mac to boot from it) They were also early to market themselves (in both quality and style) directly to Mac users. l with I believe internally they are either seagate or western digital.

djacobox372 · Apr 23, 2009

I prefer the smaller 500gb western digital because it is powered by usb and not an external power cord.

CxThree · Apr 23, 2009

those would be the western digital passport drives.

Also, check out Windows Home Server. Very nice solution for backing up PCs, files, creating a file server wiht web access, etc. You can make one out of old PC hardware like an old P4 box with as little as 512MB of ram. Throw in some large drives and you have a backup solution with redundancy within the home server too.

gravity0 · Apr 23, 2009

usayit said:
LaCie externals are very popular in the Mac world. They worked closely with Apple to insure their firewire interfaces work well with Macs. (I have a Western Digital firewire external that refuses to allow my mac to boot from it) They were also early to market themselves (in both quality and style) directly to Mac users. l with I believe internally they are either seagate or western digital.

LaCie's rock!! I own two (manual RAID) :lol:

and both work quite well. You can normally find them on sale at newegg.com for 1 tera = $100

TUX424 · Apr 23, 2009

DON'T TRUST ALL OF YOUR DATA TO ONE PLACE
That is the worst thing that you can do. I am in the process of make a copy of my hard drive on to another hard drive and making dvd copies of the same hard drive to keep at a different house 15 minutes away. I have heard of people that go to father extremes then i do. But then again I'm not really at a extreme.

photographyfanatic · Apr 24, 2009

I just got a seagate - 600mb with 7200bw on sale for under 100 bucks. Its great! It really helped the speed of my computer and photoshop performance.

B Kennedy · May 3, 2009

I've used both western digital as well as Lacie. I prefer lacie tho, I've used the rugged, as well as the safe portable drive and I have a 1tb raid at home mirrored to be my last line of defense. I have yet to have any issues with lacie except for the usb port on my rugged drive broke off. I think it was because I kept storing it in a bag with the usb wire always plugged in.

All in all I would definitely continue to invest my money in Lacie, tho I'm sure western digitial is comparable both in price, specs, and as well as durability.

benhasajeep · May 3, 2009

TUX424 said:
DON'T TRUST ALL OF YOUR DATA TO ONE PLACE
That is the worst thing that you can do. I am in the process of make a copy of my hard drive on to another hard drive and making dvd copies of the same hard drive to keep at a different house 15 minutes away. I have heard of people that go to father extremes then i do. But then again I'm not really at a extreme.

Laptop drive w/ Seagate freeagent backup when I am on the road. The freeagent has ben on about 12 excursions now and is doing fine.

Desktop drive with a WD 2nd drive for in work photos and files, with a WD 1TB external drive for final photos and files and dvd's as well. So, I might be one of those others. :mrgreen: Knock on wood I have not had a drive failure, but I have had some serious Windows failures (3 and counting).

itznfb · May 3, 2009

i use a WD MyBook 2TB Mirror edition for File Syncing and a Thecus N2100 w/2 1TB WD's for weekly full backups and nightly incrementals. a huge drawback to Lacie is that they don't manufacture their own hard drives. so they go with the lowest bidder at the time. that's why you see batches of failures from companies like Lacie or Calvary. they make decent enclosures, but when they get a shipment of drives from some lower tier HDD manufacture, you pretty much get screwed. i think Fantom uses WD drives exclusively though.