Advice on HD brand and formatting

[jmort]

I've got a PB w/ 100GB HD and am looking at getting a large external HD for backup, storing media files, and making a bootable partition for the day when that may be necessary. I'm looking at Lacie's External USB2.0 drives, particularly the <a href="http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10468">250GB model.</a> What do you guys have in the way of advice. Are these good drives? Are there any better at a comparable price?

Also, I'm wanting something I can plug into my PC and use also for transferring files to the mac. How should I format this drive so that it plays nice with PC and mac? are there any downsides to doing that? Am i looking at two partitions? I haven't really messed with this stuff before so I'm a bit lost.

Thanks all

 

[mklos]

I would buy something that has both FW400 and USB 2.0 on it. LaCie makes a large HD with both interfaces on it. You'll have to partition it if you want a Mac OS X bootable partition and one that you can see on Windows. Windows cannot read an HFS+ formatted HD. What you'll need to do is format it for FAT32. If you have 1 partition as a FAT32 Partition, both the Mac and the PC will be able to read/write to it. Mac OS X CANNOT write to NTFS, so don't format it as NTFS. LaCie are good external HDs.

 

[alexstein]

The drive you picked is fine and it is supported by your Mac. Get that drive or an equivalent with firewire connection. Mac's don't support usb 2 booting as of right now.

For the formating:
If you like to use it with your pc and mac and you want to read/write from both platforms you have to format your external in FAT32.

 

[jmort]

That's good to know I can't boot from USB, I didn't know that. Thanks.
As for formatting in FAT, are there any drawbacks to doing that as opposed to using OSX native formatting. Will it be slower or anything?

Thanks

 

[mklos]

There are no serious side effects. Just remember that an HFS+ formatted partition (OS X format) won't be readable in Windows at all. It won't even show up in My Computer....

 

[spellflower]

My 250 gig LaCie USB 2.0 drive just arrived, and I'm wondering if I should bother partitioning it. I plan to use it with my ibook G4 to store MP3s, videos, photos, and backups of Word docs.

By the way, if you're shopping for LaCie drives, be sure to check their closeouts page. It's got some great deals and seems to change frequently.