External hard drive for a PowerBook?

apollonia666 · September 2007

The Mac tricks thread made me realize there are a lot of Macheads here, so I'm hoping some of you might have some suggestions on this.

I've had a 1.5 GHz G4 PowerBook for almost three years now. It still runs great but I've managed to almost completely fill up the hard drive and I'd like to get some sort of external drive for my photos and/or my music. Any suggested brands/models that are particularly reliable and (dare I hope?) affordable?

doctorj · September 2007

I've bought several cheap external firewire/USB drives on Ebay. Never had a problem with any of them. If you only fire it up occasionally when you need to put stuff on and off, it will last longer than your internal drive; quality is not as important as it is on a drive that's always on and being moved around. Cheapo drive-in-a-box is ideal for backups and long term storage.

apollonia666 · September 2007

Thanks, doctorj! Is there a particular type I should look for to be sure it's compatible with my PowerBook, or will any kind of drive work?

carnivore · September 2007

I'm a big fan of Otherworld Computing's Mercury Elite products. I've got two 7200 rpm 500GB with 16 MB cache drives from them (set up as a mirrored RAID) with USB 2, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and eSATA connections. If you don't want all those connections (you can get ones that only have USB 2 and FireWire 400) it'll be cheaper.

I also have an old LaCie Porsche 250 GB 7200 rpm Firewire 400 drive that's been reliable for years and rarely gets turned off. They also make these cool portable hard drives of similar capacity (although generally slower speeds and smaller caches) that are great if you want to easily move large amounts of data around.

apollonia666 · September 2007

Carny, I may have to bribe you with a couple of beers at the next happy hour to get you to explain some of the terminology here.

carnivore · September 2007

Here is a good review of hard dive basics.

doctorj · September 2007

I think that so long as the drive is in a box which has the same kind of plug on it as your powerbook has available, for example Firewire (IEEE1394) &/or USB 2, it'll be fine for your needs. Other than that, there's no compatibility issues. Look at the symbols on the ports on your machine to find out what you've got.

You probably don't need to pay more for brand-name / fastest / latest / greatest / super reliable.

If you type 'firewire usb hard drive' into ebay, you'll see a bunch of 400GB Seagate drives that are really cheap. I've had many Seagate drives over the years, they've generally been excellent value and very reliable.

armchair_warrior · September 2007

just buy any external case and hd and hook it up yourself. save money and easy to use.

edit: if you wish to go the quicker route.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductList.jsp?ThirdCategoryCode=110904&SortBy=A

carnivore · September 2007

doctorj wrote: I think that so long as the drive is in a box which has the same kind of plug on it as your powerbook has available, for example Firewire (IEEE1394) &/or USB 2, it'll be fine for your needs. Other than that, there's no compatibility issues. Look at the symbols on the ports on your machine to find out what you've got.

You probably don't need to pay more for brand-name / fastest / latest / greatest / super reliable.

If you type 'firewire usb hard drive' into ebay, you'll see a bunch of 400GB Seagate drives that are really cheap. I've had many Seagate drives over the years, they've generally been excellent value and very reliable.

I disagree about the compatibility issue. As a mac user, you probably want a firewire connection (800 if you have a firewire 800 port) because that's faster than USB 2 (especially firewire 800) and you should take advantage of it. However, if you want to bring your drive to a friend's house and share non-copyright-protected files (of course), you'll want to make sure that you don't have compatibility issues, since most PCs don't have a firewire port. One spec you should definitely look for is 7200 rpm spindle speed, especially if you're going to be backing up lots of data on your drive. What doctorj says might be true if this were only a backup drive that you're going to save to once in a while and otherwise leave off, but if you're getting this because your internal drive is full and you need more space, you're probably going to be using your new drive a lot, and then speed and reliability become important. It sounds like you're planning to move your iTunes music folder and iPhoto library to the drive. Those are generally files that are accessed often, so I doubt you're just going to be leaving the thing turned off. An external hard drive is something you're going to have for years, and will continue to use when you replace your computer. It's worth the extra $50 to get a good one.

doctorj · September 2007

The cheap drives-in-boxes I've been looking at on Ebay are 7200 rpm, and have firewire and USB 2.

If you're planning to work a lot with the drive plugged in, then I agree it's worth spending a bit more for quality storage. But I figure for a laptop, where you're dumping all the old music and pictures onto a drive once a month, and deleting what you don't normally use, it doesn't matter.

If instead the plan is to actually work off the external drive, then it's worth thinking about RAID, NAS + wireless so you can get to it from anywhere, etc.

apollonia666 · September 2007

doctorj wrote: If you're planning to work a lot with the drive plugged in, then I agree it's worth spending a bit more for quality storage. But I figure for a laptop, where you're dumping all the old music and pictures onto a drive once a month, and deleting what you don't normally use, it doesn't matter.

For what it's worth, just using it for storage is probably the way I'd go. I might access it once every couple of days or so to sync my iPod if I keep all my iTunes stuff on it.

External hard drive for a PowerBook?

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