external hard drive info

[kjohnson]

looking to buy an external hard drive but unsure what to get. im kinda thinking around the 500 gb range (not portable). is speed affected by a larger drive or is it hard to notice. basically should i buy the cheapest one i can find which is compatible with my macbook? (the two cheapest i could find were the western digital and seagate models) ANy help is appreciated.

[Majost]

is speed affected by a larger drive or is it hard to notice.
Contrary to what may be common sense, increasing the capacity of a drive does *not* slow it down. In fact, if all the other specs are the same, the larger ones are typically faster. Why? Because they need to fit more data into the same amount of space at the same rotation speed, the heads (the part that reads and writes) pass over *more* data in the same amount of time.

There still are tradeoffs to larger hard drives, but with the exception of cost and availability, they are predominantly experienced only on the part of the producer. Namely, it is getting significantly more difficult to expand capacity. This means that the largest hard drives on the market are often more expensive than buying several cheap drives for the consumer, and they sometimes have slower rotation speeds.

Short of the long of it is that if you're able to swing it, go big.

basically should i buy the cheapest one i can find which is compatible with my macbook? (the two cheapest i could find were the western digital and seagate models) ANy help is appreciated.

Although there was a time when brand really made a big difference in reliability, I really don't think that is the case anymore. Granted, you will probably still find many reviewers shilling for manufacturers along with fanboy consumers, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. They typically all have three year warranties, and they all have a very small chance of failure. It's probably not statistically significant, even if there was a difference to be found.

The big things to look for are capacity, speed (you want 7200 RPM if you're going for a desktop model) and buffer size (16MB or bigger would be best with such a large drive - 8MB is pretty standard nowadays).

Since you're looking external, you'd also want to consider connectivity. Options here are USB 2, Firewire, and Firewire 800. Firewire typically performs slightly better than USB 2 for hard drives. Since they're only an incremental cost increase, you might want to look for a drive with both Firewire and USB 2 for compatibility (while all modern Macs have Firewire, not many PCs do). There really isn't that great of a jump in performance for a single Firewire 800 drive from USB or Firewire.

Whew. Does that all make sense?

[kjohnson]

yea it seems to all make sense. thanks a lot!

[bunnydetox]

as an extension on this, do I have to look for a drive that's formatted any specific way?

I found this drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148233

it's in my budget and has all the space I think I'll need, but I'm not sure if it'd be compatible...any suggestions?

[aaronsadowsky]

yea i saw that exact drive with a rebate for 50 dollars on dealnews.com they also have another site dealmac.com which is part of dealnews but for a wider selection i usually check dealnews, i have 2 500 gig hard drives and a portable 120 yea i am a little crazy about storage but 500 is really all you need unless you're gonna duplicate files when you back them up (like different versions of apps or docs of different dates) anyways I bought a cavalry 500 gig and it is much quieter than my Fantom, but here is what i use to when i look at hard drives...

http://dealnews.com/categories/Computer/Storage/Hard-Drives/External-Hard-Drives/472.html

[aaronsadowsky]

by the way be careful when you buy something with a mail in rebate...make sure you have enough time to send it back and if not...wait because they occasionally a deal will pop up with an online rebate code which (obviously) is better because you don't have to mail it in...

[RobUSVI]

as an extension on this, do I have to look for a drive that's formatted any specific way?

No, you do not need a specific format on a new drive. However, if the drive was not formatted for Mac, then it will not automatically mount on the desktop. You will need to initialize the disk, using disk utility, before you can use it.