External Hard Drives

by **Mad City Mike** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 11:50 am

We just bought a new Mac and are storing all our important stuff on its hard drive. We are thinking of buying a USB hard drive so we can back stuff up to it. Is this an easy thing to do? Does the hard drive have to have an OS on it? Or do you just plug it in when you want to do a back up?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

by **Jim** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 11:58 am

With PC's all you have to do is plug in the USB and it come's up by itself. Quite literally plug and play. Unplug it, take it elsewhere or store it... plug it back in and play again...

by **Mad City Mike** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 12:05 pm

Jim wrote:With PC's all you have to do is plug in the USB and it come's up by itself. Quite literally plug and play. Unplug it, take it elsewhere or store it... plug it back in and play again...

Well, if it works that easy for a PC, then it must be even easier on a Mac

.

by **Jim** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 12:11 pm

Yeah... maybe you won't even have to plug it in. It will just "know"

by **Admin** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 12:23 pm

Mad City Mike wrote:We just bought a new Mac and are storing all our important stuff on its hard drive. We are thinking of buying a USB hard drive so we can back stuff up to it. Is this an easy thing to do? Does the hard drive have to have an OS on it? Or do you just plug it in when you want to do a back up?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

How much data do you have to back-up? We were going to buy an external drive but then decided to just burn our data files onto DVD+RWs for the time being.

by **Mad City Mike** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 1:21 pm

Must back up lots of large image files. It looks like one can get a hard drive for about 100 bucks.

by **rasbatch** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 1:50 pm

you might be better off with an internal, ,more byte per buck. They are also a breeze to install at least on a PC, I'm not worthy of the exalted MAC status :lol:

by **Jim** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 1:52 pm

I wan under the inpression that MACs were considered PERFECT the way the are made, and therefore do not have the internal room for upgrades/add-ons.

by **ExPatriatePen** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 1:58 pm

Jim wrote:I wan under the inpression that MACs were considered PERFECT the way the are made, and therefore do not have the internal room for upgrades/add-ons.

They gained more room when they swiched from those Bulky Motorola processors to the sleek Intel ones. :-)

by **bfjosh** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 5:33 pm

On your lovely Mac, when you plug it in via USB, or firewire, an icon will appear on your desktop, with whatever name your drive has, thats it. dead easy.

If you have more than 1 computer, I would strongly recommend something more like NAS (Network Attached Storage) This is a Linksys SLUG which is a network controller for USB storage (which will allow you to attach multiple USB disks to your network - I am paranoid about data loss).

Anyway, the LaCie USB external drives are excellent, and designed primarily for Macs, so I would recommend them, even though they aren't the cheapest.

by **Rychster** on Mon Mar 20, 2006 7:39 pm

Mad City Mike wrote:We just bought a new Mac and are storing all our important stuff on its hard drive. We are thinking of buying a USB hard drive so we can back stuff up to it. Is this an easy thing to do? Does the hard drive have to have an OS on it? Or do you just plug it in when you want to do a back up?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Get yourself one of these. I bought one a couple months ago with zero problems. I use it to back up 3 Hard Drives worth of stuff. Research it to see if it will work well with a Mac. I think it does. Shop around and get a good price. I bought it at Newegg.com.

http://www.iomega.com/direct/products/d ... 2897664487

by **MrKnowNothing** on Thu Mar 23, 2006 8:16 pm

It's probably more cost conscious to go with an internal, or sort of take and internal and turn it into an external, but the price is really not all that different.

I have a Seagate 160 GB external that I was able to get with a bunch of rebates from Circuit City for like 100 bucks. I haven't opened it yet.