Recommendations for an external firewire backup drive

[Cox Orange]

???

TimeMachine is a free program, just add external harddrive...1.5Tb for under $100 at buy.com....closer to $50 for smaller drives

sorry, I ment TimeCapsule, or what is that thing that looks like an AppleTV and is advertised with xxxGB?

You REALLY think trying your luck with an unerase program (Norton) is better than being able to go back hours, days, weeks or even months in TimeMachine to have a nearly 100% chance of retrieving a lost file?

Ok, but then I can just use an external HDD an CCC or Super Duper. The downside may, be, that one can't go back months. But on a 1,5TB HDD there should be space to partition it and have backups from several times of backing up seperately. I thought TimeMachine and TimeCapsule are sold together and one would need to buy the Capsule. Sorry.

 

[mstrze]

Ok, but then I can just use an external HDD an CCC or Super Duper. The downside may, be, that one can't go back months. But on a 1,5TB HDD there should be space to partition it and have backups from several times of backing up seperately. I thought TimeMachine and TimeCapsule are sold together and one would need to buy the Capsule. Sorry.

Or...you can just buy the external and run TM, which is already present on your Mac and doesn't require an additional download or jumping through hoops to partition to accomplish an even better version of what you are suggesting.

CCC and Super Duper are excellent ways to clone your drive and make a backup, but anyone who has a 'free' external with a current gen Mac is missing out on a free, simple and unobtrusive way to keep your files backed-up.

Cox Orange, you should really try Time Machine. You don't seem to understand how powerful a program it is. You keep trying to find ways to not use it...making the process much more involved than it can be by just using it.

 

[eljanitor]

Just get an external hard drive that's Firewire 800. I personally never had any issues with Rocstor external drives. Another thing you can do is get an external Firewire 800 case made by Acomdata at Frys, or other retailers that stock them, and pick the internal SATA hard drive of your choice and make your own for a low cost.
(Always ground yourself when handling bare drives!!!!!)

Id stay away from Western Digital as they released a line of external hard drives with "Smartware" which is this virtual disk backup feature that mounts itself to your desktop each time you restart the computer.

I have tried several ways to remove the feature from the drive just to find it reappear later. I'm sure a script could be made to stop that from happening, but you can just eject it every restart without ejecting the external Hard drive thankfully. So I don't recommend the Western Digital "My Book" line up of external drives for Mac until they provide a better way to remove this feature then they have currently suggested.

 

[mstrze]

Id stay away from Western Digital as they released a line of external hard drives with "Smartware" which is this virtual disk backup feature that mounts itself to your desktop each time you restart the computer.

I have tried several ways to remove the feature from the drive just to find it reappear later. I'm sure a script could be made to stop that from happening, but you can just eject it every restart without ejecting the external Hard drive thankfully. So I don't recommend the Western Digital "My Book" line up of external drives for Mac until they provide a better way to remove this feature then they have currently suggested.

I have 2 WD My Books (a 1Tb and a 1.5TB). One was purchased 18 months ago, the other maybe 9 months ago? Neither has this software that I can see. Certainly there is nothing that mounts to my desktop with each restart. Is this a recent addition?

I can say nothing but great things about my WD drives. One has been serving my iTunes library for over a year and the other has been my TM backup since the fall.

eljanitor: Did you erase/reformat the drive? I can't recall if I did that to either when I first got mine, but TM only works with a certain format I believe, so it may have done it automatically for me. Again, I have no trace of this software. Perhaps you installed some sort of script that does this?

 

[Cox Orange]

@ mstrz

You are right. I will give it a try, when I get my first Intel-Mac (PowerPC-owner for 11 years).

The case & bare drive thing makes total sense. I like the Macally cases & I'm trying to decide between the WD Cavier Green & Black versions. It seems Green is quite a bit cheaper (at least on Amazon).

Could anyone tell me what the difference is in quality & which is the better buy?

As Talmy allready said... Caviar Black is the 7200rpm version, hotter, faster. Green has intelliPower. A feature developed by WD, that they say, would choose the drive speed that is currently needed. I read a review, where they said, they could force no scenario, where the drive span up, it was constantly 5400rpm (or 5900rpm, I do not remember exactly).
Actually their homepage says what the drives are for. "Green: cool, quiet, eco-friendly" (means energy saving). http://www.wdc.com/en/products/catalog/

As said before, in an external drive you might not need a fast drive, when using it only for backup and the USB/Firewire connector (though FW800 is noot that slow) might cut speed anyways. But what I would consider against this, is, that you might want to use this drive later in your PC and you might want to have a faster drive then. If the drive is big, the spindle speed could make a difference in accessing time. (I did not test this

qualitywise... you can't say since every gen. of HDD is different. The very early Green WDs with 64MB had problems. When you look at Ebay, you will find many people selling newly sealed drives. They are often from an exchange (people sent their defective drive to WD and they send a new one back, but the customer might had become suspicious and did not wanr to try the same line again). That said, it is not said that it is still the fact. Every drive can fail and that will not give answer to whether the manufacturer or line is crappy.

When I look under xlr8yourmac I find that Hitachi drives seem to be the least failing Drives for Macs. WD seems to be good to Macs, too. But that doesn't mean, that you can't be happy with another manufacturer.

 

[eljanitor]

I have 2 WD My Books (a 1Tb and a 1.5TB). One was purchased 18 months ago, the other maybe 9 months ago? Neither has this software that I can see. Certainly there is nothing that mounts to my desktop with each restart. Is this a recent addition?

I can say nothing but great things about my WD drives. One has been serving my iTunes library for over a year and the other has been my TM backup since the fall.

eljanitor: Did you erase/reformat the drive? I can't recall if I did that to either when I first got mine, but TM only works with a certain format I believe, so it may have done it automatically for me. Again, I have no trace of this software. Perhaps you installed some sort of script that does this?

Yes the hard drive is on an iMac that had another external hard drive as a back up, the previous back up hard drive was replaced with a WD "My Book for Mac". This person constantly has issues on every bootup that the Smartware virtual CD mounts to the desktop at startup. (see this link)

I don't know exactly when this drive was purchased except that it was sometime in 2010 maybe in the last 4 or 5 months that I had the pleasure or removing it from its retail box and hooking it up.

I erased and formatted the external hard drive a few times with no success. After going to Western Digital help pages and doing what they suggest it still mounts to the desktop every single time you boot the computer.

I have and have had other Western Digital products that work great and that I use myself. I like their green line of Internal bare drives as they consume less power then other hard drives. I've seen all hard drives from every manufacturer have some kind of problem at some point because of the nature of my work.

When it comes to the Mac the best thing they ever did was give us "Time Machine." This makes other backup software not necessary for home users unless you're running 10.4 Tiger or below.

 

[mstrze]

eljanitor:

I purchased a brand new 1TB WD MyBook drive 2 weeks ago from Best Buy to replace my iTunes drive, saw the info on the box about this back-up software, but I can tell you that I do not have it on my drive. Certainly nothing mounts to the desktop upon startup...and I have restarted probably 3times in the last 2 weeks.

I used Disk Utility to format the drive at the start, then had TM restore the iTunes data to the drive.


I don't know what I did 'wrong', but I wish you luck with your hassles.