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Advice on an external HDD

K

Kimi

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 29, 2005
233
0
Newcastle, England/ Stirling Scotland
I'm looking for a external HDD to store all my DVDs as MP4s for when I go to university (one box beats having about 20 boxsets + movies). It's going to need to be 300GB or more for this to fit. I've found this: Seagate ST3300801CB-RK. Seems a good price. Anyone of these who can tell me if they are an good?

As I'm not going to be carrying this about (only going to be sitting on a desk) it's not a problem to get an internal one then incase it; but I've got no idea how this works or if it's safe. External power is also fine. I'm guessing that thouse that don't have power cords are small and more expensive.
 
Seagates are excellent drives in my opinion. They are reliable and have the best warranties out of any hard drive manufacturer on the market. I highly recommend them, but everyone has their own opinion I suppose. ;) :cool:
 
It appears to be USB only. Not the best way to go. You be much happier with a Firewire connection. Personally I always get enclosures that support Firewire (for my mac) and USB (in case I have to connect it to a PC without firewire).
 
The drive I linked to does support Firewire:
Interface Type: IEEE 1394 (FireWire) / Hi-Speed USB
Connector: 4 pin USB, 6 PIN FireWire
...
Cables Included: 1 x USB cable ¦ 1 x IEEE 1394 cable
Click to expand...
Why is Firewire better? The only reason I can think of is that it will be something else to fill the ports in in my iMac (my iPod is in the other firewire port and all the USB are filled, I need to get a hub too.)
 
Despite the rated speeds of USB2, the fact is that sustained transfer rates of firewire are much higher and less dependent on the cpu, since it is all done in hardware. In addition, a firewire drive can usually be used as a boot drive for a Mac (not all enclosures/chipsets support this). This is great for cloning your internal drive to an external and then booting (this is not possible in the Windows world). My son used this feature over winter break; he brought home his hard disk and booted it on my mini, and had his complete environment right there, and he could do work on my computer while his was still at college.
 
I have a g-technology and love it, has a great look but may be too pricey for ya, I also have the 300gb seagate and it works great. My g-tech is a mini and only 100gb and I use it to keep my 12" PB backed up, it is nice and small, shirt pocket size, bus powered FW, and is a dream.

http://www.g-technology.com
 
bigbossbmb said:
Buy an internal seagate drive, put it in a firewire enclosure...

It is a cheaper and you'll have a 5yr warranty on the drive rather than just 1.
Click to expand...
Cheeper? I looked about a bit and found that it would cost about £40 for a case + the cost of the HDD it's self which will be about £100. That's not really cheeper.
 
bigbossbmb said:
Buy an internal seagate drive, put it in a firewire enclosure...

It is a cheaper and you'll have a 5yr warranty on the drive rather than just 1.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, this is actually what I was referring to - Seagate's excellent 5-year warranty, which evidently this external drive does not have. And yes, I prefer HD enclosures to external HD myself - much more economical. :cool:
 
As an added benefit, with an external enclosure you can pick what you want, and get a better total system. For example, I jave a beautiful Rosewill RX30 enclosure with an Oxford chipset that I like much better than my son's OWC Mercury, and all for less money!
 
danny_w said:
Despite the rated speeds of USB2, the fact is that sustained transfer rates of firewire are much higher and less dependent on the cpu, since it is all done in hardware. In addition, a firewire drive can usually be used as a boot drive for a Mac (not all enclosures/chipsets support this). This is great for cloning your internal drive to an external and then booting (this is not possible in the Windows world). My son used this feature over winter break; he brought home his hard disk and booted it on my mini, and had his complete environment right there, and he could do work on my computer while his was still at college.
Click to expand...
Booting from the disc won't be much use to me, I've only got one Mac and it that dies then I can just use the boot from DVD option and try and dig my files out. Also transfere rates won't be an issue as I'll just copy what season I'm watching over to the iMac when I'm watching so I don't have to have the disc pluged in all the time. It would be useful if there was going to be another Mac here at home.

Also, I did a bit of Maths on size of the files and how much it's going to take up. If I encode at about 350MB for a 45min show, then I'll end up taking up about 280GB, so there no room for anything else on there.

I think I'm just going to get the Seagate external I linked too. I'll pick up another one to use as a back up for my iMac for when I go (and when I've got some money as I've just spent loads on DS games and hockey jerseys :D). I'll be able to back up a second Mac on the same drive if I get an iBook some once I'm at university (discount you see).
 
danny_w said:
As an added benefit, with an external enclosure you can pick what you want, and get a better total system. For example, I jave a beautiful Rosewill RX30 enclosure with an Oxford chipset that I like much better than my son's OWC Mercury, and all for less money!
Click to expand...

Yep - just make sure you get an Oxford 911 (or 912) chipset and you'll bet set. :cool:

Kimi said:
Cheeper? I looked about a bit and found that it would cost about £40 for a case + the cost of the HDD it's self which will be about £100. That's not really cheeper.
Click to expand...

I don't know what "cheeper" means :p but I think you also have to factor in the fact that the cost/GB is constantly going down. Therefore, instead of paying more for an external drive, buy the same capacity in an internal model for less, and then in the future, if it fills up, you can replace it and use the same enclosure, as opposed to having to buy an entirely new external drive. :cool:
 
~Shard~ said:
I don't know what "cheeper" means :p but I think you also have to factor in the fact that the cost/GB is constantly going down. Therefore, instead of paying more for an external drive, buy the same capacity in an internal model for less, and then in the future, if it fills up, you can replace it and use the same enclosure, as opposed to having to buy an entirely new external drive. :cool:
Click to expand...
Ah, that's a good point you've got there. I can see how that will help, but the chances of me upgrading in the next four years are slim, money isn't going to a strong point. And by that time I get out of uni I'll be getting a new computer and that'll have a load of space.

I'm going to have to thing about it a bit. I'll got take a look about later once I've gotten some sleep.
 
Kimi said:
Ah, that's a good point you've got there. I can see how that will help, but the chances of me upgrading in the next four years are slim, money isn't going to a strong point. And by that time I get out of uni I'll be getting a new computer and that'll have a load of space.

I'm going to have to thing about it a bit. I'll got take a look about later once I've gotten some sleep.
Click to expand...

Fair enough - you have to do what's right for you, and I'm sure you'll make the best decision for your situation. :)
 
for the booting bit - it depends how much customisation you do to your system, if it's quite a bit then using something like Xupport to create a bootable backup of your whole system on an external drive means that if your system does go down you can just format the internal and boot and backup from the backup to get right back to normal as opposed to re-installing etc.
In my experience the times when the failure is so bad that you need to boot from the system cd/dvd, its often that the drive is so badly rooted that you're not going to recover anything.

and as stated earlier it means you can have your mac on anyone elses without interfering with their system.

I like Seagate BTW, and fanless enclosures (just make sure they're ATA-6 compatible so it can take big volumes).
 
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