I am looking for between a 250GB and 500GB External Hard Drive with USB 2.0/Firewire 400 support. I was wondering what is a good HDD that will work with my Mac and have good seek times. Any advice on looking for a good one would be very helpful.
Well personally I don't think that you can go wrong with Seagates new Freeagent series. The only drawback is they are not stackable like Western Digitals Mybook series. I have a Mybook at work and it looks like a hard back book fro the wide edges with the top botton and back full of convection cooling holes.
The Seagate freeagent series have a wide base with a thin drive. Can't figure out how they keep the drives cool 7200.10 series with 5 year warranty but it is very cool. It has a high techno look with a glowing yellow vull length 1/4 inch wide light strip that pulsates (not flashes) when activity is present. They come in 500, 750 and I think 320 and 250 gig. You pay for options, you can find a basic 500 with USB only and 8 meg buffer for under $120 US. Firewire and external SATA will cost a $40 to $60 premium. They seem to come with any of the three combinations of interfaces. It must be reformatted for MAC use because they chose NTFS rather than FAT32 for the file system. I don't remember what the file system is on my WD Mybook at work. Newegg has pictures of both brands and models. I can not vouch for the Maxtor series from direct experience.
Well the thing is I am going to be hooking up the external drive to a MBP, will this cause any problems with the products that have those "One Button Backup" and things that only work in Windows?
I looked at both the Maxtor MyBook and Seagate Freeagent a few weeks ago. I read on CNET that the Maxtor fails if electricity is cut. Since I work in field camps with unreliable electricity supply, I went for the Seagate. I did not have a problem when power was cut. However, I did have a problem when I knocked the drive off a table. I took apart the casing, and will plug the drive (7200.10 Barracuda) into my computer at home, but I think it's done for.
How hard is it to open those up? I've heard you wreck the case to get at the drive, but I'm thinking just to destroy it once I'm done using the drive.
Does the Freeagent come with any backup software? The Freeagent Pro apparently does, but the Newegg reviews make it sound like the regular Freeagent doesn't.
EDIT: Sounds like from another thread there are no visible screws, but you can pry apart the base fairly easily to get at screws?
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