Firewire external hard drives - My Book Pros any good?

[powerbook911]

I ordered a 500 GB Western Digital My Book Pro edition today. I love the silver look to match my Mac stuff, and the Firewire 800, for the future (my macs can't use it right now).

Is this a good drive, for use with my iMac? Any idea the best way to partition? I wonder what would be the best for when Time Machine comes out?

I put my Mac to sleep a lot, so I hope that won't cause any trouble, with an external drive connected. Thanks.

 

[iDavidLeeRoth]

I like how they look, but I've been burned time and time again by WD. I'll never buy another product from those crooks again.


It's cheapest to just buy your own 20-25 dollar external enclosure and a cheap hdd. You'll certainly save money doing it like that.

I believe that Time Machine will require a full dedicated drive, i.e. not a partition.


For now, I would use Disk Utility to format the drive into one 400 gb Mac OS X Journaled portion. I would make the rest FAT32 for compatibility with Win32. I tend to give a lot of data to friends. I also transfer data from my own Win32 machines. If you don't have Windows machines, you might want to have a 200 gb partition for movies, a 100 gb for music, etc...