Hard Drive recommendations! - Apple compatible

[danny]

I am on the hunt for a couple of hard drives to use as photo storage. I did a search through the forums and the only thread I can find dates back to 2009 which is a "life time" in technology terms.

Any suggestions, I was looking at getting 2 so I can backup the back up and remove a lot of photos from my computer. They would need to be compatible with Mac.

Cheers
Danny

[ameerat42]

About a lifetime ago I got a WD Elements 1.5 TB drive.
(It must have outlived me by now.) AFAIK it is certainly Apple compatible.
Have you looked any up?
Try here, maybe.
Am.

[David W]

Hi Danny, Glad you asked the question as I've been undecided about a replacement storage unit for my Mac for some time.

I've just been talking to a friend (who uses a MacBook Pro) who has been using a Western Digital "My Passport USB drive" for a couple of months and loves it. The unit is fairly small yet holds either 1 or 2TB of data, depending on the model. He says it was virtually play and play and finds the speed of the USB 3 connection fast enough.

Western Digital also make another unit of the same size, the "Passport Studio" that has the advantage of being able to connect to some Macs via FireWire 800. Unfortunately Apple seem to have decided to drop Firewire for their new "Thunderbolt" high speed connection standard so, if you're contemplating getting a new Mac in the future the Studio unit would have to be connected via the older USB 2.

Both units are available for the Apple.AU website.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

David

[Lance B]

How big?

I just purchased a couple of Seagate 500Gb slim line portable hard drives and as they are small and slim they were so that I could take them on holidays to download each days photos onto them via my laptop. They are Mac compatible.

[danny]

AM - cheers for the link and the recommendation. WD is certainly look good, especially given the price.

David - great to see someone in the same boat :2smile: My BIG concern is the fact that i am looking at getting something that is extremely trustworthy because I was hoping to MOVE some photos from my macbook Pro as I have filled it up. I have just found one of these - LaCie 3TB Porsche Design P'9233 USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive online for $170 which looks good because unlike the WD reviews I can't find a bad word said about them. Would be interested in knowing what you think?

Lance B - big enough to be the primary storage for all of my photos.

Cheers
Danny

- - - Updated - - -

My head is spinning now... i have read so many reviews online. Does anyone out there in AP use a double hard drive set up
like a WD Duo?

Cheers
Danny

[Roosta]

WD 2TB's are on special at Jb Hifi, and they're stand alone. I have tried two Seagate HD's and would never buy a Seagate again, had nothing but trouble with both of them.

[davsv1]

I use 2 of these http://www.epowermac.com.au/shop/pc/Stardom-iTANK-i310-WBS3-eSATA-FW800-USB3-0-Case-Only-359p2487.htm well actually older usb2.0 versions ( i'm upgrading to these for usb3 on the new iMac) and I have 6 caddies that I can swap drives in and out and store off site etc as I choose. When a drive is full or shows sign of failure (never happened yet) I can just buy a new drive of whatever brand size etc I choose. I even had an ssd drive working in one to transfer software to a new internal drive. I use WD black drives, more expensive than greens but faster and longer life according to WD website. I've not had a failure in 4 years but did have a WD my book enclosure fail on firewire, still worked on usb though. Remember Laice, etc don't make hard drives, they will have WD or Seagate or samsung drives in them, not that that is a problem just so you know. Really as with most things it comes down to how mush $$$ you want to spend, the sky is the limit really.

[wolffman]

Check out owc at www.macsales.com.
I just replaced the internal Hd in my MacBook pro with a 750gb 7200 rpm drive and it totally changed my machine. Seagate momentus hybrid ssd. Much faster performance, more room and you can get a casing to house your old drive to make it a portable.
It's very simple to replace and you could even swap out the optical drive to put in another drive in its place and significantly beef up your on board storage. If you replace the optical drive with a SSD and transfer your programmes and booting to this drive then it would absolutely fly.
They have some good secure FireWire interface units as well.

[Allie]

I have the same seagate drives as Lance (only wish I had his talent) which come with memeo instant back up and unlike Roosta I've never had a problem. I thought most external harddrives these day are compatible with both mac and pc operating systems. My boss used to back up his system to his ipod classic as well as his WD drive. I'd recommend you buy a known brand in the size above your requirement depending on cost constraints and just do it soon.

[Warbler]

Personally, I'd stay away from those two-disc RAID setups. I've had three of the four I bought fail. Had to buy special software to recover the info from the RAID partitions. Invariably, when I dismantled them and tested each of the hard drives, one had failed and the other was still workable. I had them setup in RAID0 though as it was the disc space I was after.

These days, I just buy those WD Elements drives in 2TB capacity. When filled, they get a label and go back into the box with the cords, power and USB, and get stored in the cupboard until required.

Be careful with some HDDs you buy. Apparently some makers don't use the standard SATA connections on discs anymore, so they only fit that original enclosure. The retailer who told me that didn't tell me which ones, but as he was their tech repair man rather than a salesman, I believed him.

Cheers,
Tim

[ROA44]

I have a relatively new Seagate 750gig USB Portable hard drive stopped working late last year, not 6 months old. It was being used as a back up but now have to send it off for replacement & loose photos not happy so me thinks not get seagate any more normally use WD but took a chance on slightly lower price S/gate Not Sure if they have a local autoized agent in Sth. Aus. Good luck with your selection

[arthurking83]

For a totally future proof solution look to a NAS device.

You can get a NAS enclosure for as low as $130, and a fast hard 2 or 3T drive to suit for about $100-150(less if you want a 'green' alternative).

So for less than $300, you could have a far more flexible set up and bypass the annoying dependency on connections that become outdated.

As an example, a Buffalo LinkStation Duo could be had for $129, to which you would add one or two drives of your choice.
(I'd recommend if you add two drives, to use JBOD, and not raid .. keep the disks independent of each other).

Being a networked component, you connect it via ethernet cable, either to the computer directly or (better still) to your router.

They end up being just a bit more expensive than a couple of off the shelf external drives, but the flexibility is worth the expense.

[Warbler]

The downside to an ethernet NAS is speed. I copied 2TB of data to mine last month. Took a week to copy, and that is no exaggeration. If you want to work on image files stored on them, they are a serious speed bottleneck. They do provide good capacity though, and as Arthur says, you can access them from anywhere on the network.

My NAS was a WD Sharespace 4TB in JBOD.

[arthurking83]

..... you can access them from anywhere on the network.

.....

make that from anywhere in the world(if set up right).

The trick to network speed is good quality gigabit ethernet gear.


eg. I had a (apparently!) gigabit switch between my PC and a media server/ftp device in another room.
The gigabit network was too fast for the totally incapable switch to handle, and I kept getting timeouts and subsequently loss of data writing to the ftp server.

I wanted a new switch anyhow, mainly for the PoE capability, and in tracing down what was going wrong with the data loss/timeouts, it turned out that the old switch was the problem.

The new PoE capable switch is three times faster, no timeouts and not a single dropped byte of data.
Write speeds to the ftp server is slow(10Mb/s) but that's due to the cheap nature of the device(a cheap Chinese device).
Read speeds are a lot faster tho.

As with any chain, eliminate the weakest link and improvements are there to be found.

other sources of slow ethernet connections are found in most onboard gigabit chips .. usually of the cheapest type on most motherboards.

[danny]

Arthur - Thanks for the info regarding the Buffalo LinkStation Duo. I stumbled across something similar and thought it looked great however WD version (the one I could find anyway) was around $400. The Buffalo is half of that. Thank you, I think that this is probably the best option.

Cheers
Danny

[Warbler]

Thanks for that info Arthur. I too have a gigabit ethernet port on my motherboard, but having now checked, I have found that my router has only 100mbit/sec ports, so that will be the problem. Damn, I hate that! I wonder if the puny CPU in the NAS will then be the bottleneck. Might be worth considering what you have there too Danny.

[arthurking83]

...... I have found that my router has only 100mbit/sec ports, so that will be the problem. ......

It won't help I suppose.

but I've got a few routers and not all of them are capable providing good throughput on their 'supposed' gigabit LAN ports.

So far(as expected too) the Netgear R6300 provides about the best LAN performance I've seen.

[magrose]

Chatted to a person in an electrics store pre Xmas about back up devices. He is also a photographer and says he uses the WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo. Apparently it has its own internal back up partition. Might be worth checking out. Cheers

[danny]

Thanks Magrose would love one of those but at 1K + it is a little over my price range.

opened the SMH today (online) and look what I found

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/tossup-portable-hard-drives-20130110-2chd5.html

It will be a toss up between this dual hard drive or maybe the Buffalo LinkStation Duo. I am thinking the Buffalo would be great because I can link it directly to my network.

Cheers
Danny