As I will be in the market for an external hard drive later this year when I Switch to Mac plus the fact that Leopard will have Time Machine (which requires an external drive) I have been wandering the forums in search of the best external hard drive to buy. What I have discovered is a lot of confusing info. e.g. some swear by LaCie others do not. Though I have noticed that the older LaCie's seem to get a better review than the later ones. Now because of the new Time Machine a lot of people are going to want one, as Steve Jobs would like us all to backup, (and we all should). On my own PC I have 3 separate internal drives, one of which is solely devoted to backup.

What I would like to suggest is that someone who is knowledgeable/experienced with external hard drives do a Poll and that this Poll be exclusive to "Off the Shelf" external hard drives, not ones where you build your self, as I believe this will be the way that most Mac users will be going when Time Machine arrives and this question of "which external hard drive is best?" will keep popping up.

The quality of the external hard-drive comes down to 2 things- the enclosure and the drive.

If you want to be 100% sure of a good enclosure, buy your own and whack your own HDD in it. MacPower make excellent quality external enclosures - www.macpower.com as to Wiebetech - www.wiebetech.com

Things to look for in an enclosure are ventilation (don't want that HDD boiling and failing) and the chipset (if you're using FireWire, there's nothing to worry about, but if you're using USB 2.0, make sure it's an Oxford chipset, not a Prolific chipset, as the latter has issues on OS X and in general with speed/reliability).

Then there's the hard-drive you want in it. I don't think there is one brand more reliable than the other any more. There are certain models within brand line ups that are "enterprise" grade rather than desktop grade. Like the Western Digital RE2 series, which has a Mean Time Before Failure of 1.2 million hours. That's the key measurement when gauging reliability (I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate, but that's all we really have to go on, as it's a lucky dip, like all electronics). This stat normally isn't listed in consumer drives, so there you go. If you stick to Seagate or Western Digital, I don't think there should be any issues.

I find that choosing your own enclosure and your own drive lets you pick the most reliable parts yourself. I know some of the Lacie enclosures are a total pain to open up in case your drive fails. The price normally works out the same, or a bit more expensive to build your own, but you're generally using better gear.

Like Decryption said build your own, it's not worth the hassle of buying a brand name drive. Brand name drives usually have very short warranties (usually 1 yr) compared to bare drives (usually 3-5 yrs). Also, the enclosures are sometime sabotaged to prevent you from replacing a failed drive. I had a 250GB Maxtor OneTouch containing a Maxtor drive which failed just outside the 1 yr warranty. I installed a 250GB Hitachi drive and the enclosure edited the drives firmware to limit it to 128GB.

That being said if you really feel the need to go brand name the Western Digital My Book drives have a 3 yr warranty.

That's the one I've been eyeing off. Most retailers have the 500GB model for under $300.

Consider too that a large proportion of hard drives that fail either fail early in there life or late in their life. Once you've purchased you new drive run it constantly for about 2 weeks throwing data at it occasionally, data you can afford to loose. If its going to fail, rather know about before you start relying on it for backups. After that period has passed and it hasn't failed you should be reasonably clear now until the MTBF threshold before you encounter problems again. In any case, you shouldn't rely on it solely and make backups to other media and other disks as warranted by the importance of you data. And if you haven't already done so consider a USP or something similar to deliver clean power to your computing devices.

Chris

I just purchased Antec's new MX-1 actively cooled (it has a fan to cool the drive) eSATA+USB2 enclosure which I'd been seeing good reviews of around the net. I put a 750GB 7200RPM Seagate SATA in it last night and it is incredibly quiet (I already had a 320GB Seagate SATA drive in a Cooler Master case and whilst it is also reasonably quiet it is much noisier than the Antec case (which is essentially totally silent)).

Rather than start a new thread I may as well ask it here:-

I'm from a PC enviro and new to the Mac enviro.

Q: Back in PC land, partitioning, partition sizes, seek times and tables were an issue in terms of HDD size and performance. Is this the same under OS X? No laughing now, I've been conditioned by the dark side!

I would presume on a hardware level, it's the same. The only difference being that the Mac uses HFS+ as it's native file system, but Windows uses NTFS. If you're making a FAT32 drive, the rules would be identical.

Thanks for all your replies and though I feel quite confident I could build my own Ext HD (as I have been building my own PC's for over a decade), what about all those other folks who are not capable of building their own or who just do not want to. Are they to just walk in and rely on the sales pitch for what ever Ext HD the local retailer is pushing. I feel there is going to be an increase in Ext HD's in the market place due to Time Machine and that there properly will be an influx of some nasty ones out there pushed by unscrupulous retailers who just what the sale. If they could just come to a forum like this and be able to gather an answer in an easy, non-technical way (Brand A is better than Brand B) then this would also add more good points for Apple Mac's - They Just Work.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, just wanting to know if Time Machine is going to want a whole drive to itself like a lot of backup systems seem to do?
I would like to plug into our file server at work and use time machine to backup to a folder or something, but obviously don't want to have to reformat or anything like that.

time machine looks good. I am looking to build my own 500gb western digital external drive. Something like time machine sounds like it will be a good way to backup

I'm keen to know this also. I'd like to backup with time machine over wireless to an Airport extreme Airdisk, but I also want to keep my iTunes library and other stuff on the same 500Gb drive. Anyone here using Leopard beta with an Airport extreme w/USB drive??

Edit: I'm suspecting that it doesn't as the Leopard site on apple.com mentions the following:



I'd still like to hear from anyone that knows for sure.