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View Full Version : Portable hard drives...drawbacks?


psmith2.0
2012-03-28, 22:31
My sister needs to get a sub-$100/500GB external hard drive for her new iMac. Are there any particular benefits or drawbacks to those ones called "portable"?

These tend to get their power from the single USB cable. Are these meant for lighter laptop/travel use, or are these suitable for an "always connected", desktop-based Time Machine use?

Looking at your basic Western Digital and Seagate offerings. May snag something this weekend...

torifile
2012-03-28, 22:41
It's been a while since I've been in the market for a portable HD but my recollection is that the ones that are considered "portable" and able to draw power off the USB port are slower and generally more expensive than other drives. If it's going to be on a desk, you should get a desktop drive.

jdcfsu
2012-03-29, 06:41
I recently bought a 500GB WD Passport drive to allow booting into a seperate operating system for testing, and it's solely USB powered and runs great. I was actually surprised at how quickly it worked off my MBP. It was considerably slower on my 6 year old iMac, but that was to be expected. It was something like $80 at Target, so that's a pretty solid deal if you ask me.

PKIDelirium
2012-03-29, 14:07
You can get what I have, 1TB Western Digital MyBook (desktop size), for about $100 at Staples. They also have 500GB ones (I think) for a bit less).

Dorian Gray
2012-04-03, 03:59
If you haven't already got a drive, consider that:

1. Portable hard drives typically use standard 2.5-inch disks, like the ones in a Mac mini or MacBook Pro. They seem to work fine even in 24/7 applications.

2. Portable drives are more shock-resistant than 3.5-inch disks, are quieter in operation, and – as you mentioned – are powered by the USB connection. These characteristics make them a good choice if you don't strictly need the extra capacity-per-dollar of 3.5-inch (desktop) drives.

3. Although 3.5-inch disks are typically a bit faster than 2.5-inch disks, they're all the same speed over USB 2.0.

4. Western Digital make excellent hard drives, but I'm not convinced their enclosures are any good. I've read more complaints about WD enclosures than all other brands combined, and experienced a failure myself (see this thread (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?p=560839) if interested). Maybe they've improved recently?

drewprops
2012-04-03, 08:30
Don't forget that some are available with FW400/800 connectors, which also provide power and increased transfer speeds. The new iMac still has FW ports, right?

I've have several portable units. Some Seagate, some from Other World Computing, and some from Hitachi. The Hitachi was a bit balky about mounting from the FW connector at times, it seems it was an issue with their drives. I would trick it by first mounting it via USB then ejecting it and re-mounting with the FW cable.

Good luck! :)


...

jdcfsu
2012-04-03, 09:25
Don't forget that some are available with FW400/800 connectors, which also provide power and increased transfer speeds

In reality, it's very difficult to find a portable hard drive with FireWire that isn't grossly overpriced. It's why I went with the USB 2.0 WD Passport 2.5" drive I mentioned above. I could buy that drive in any store in town whereas a similar sized drive with FireWire would require an online purchase and an increase in the price by about 40%. It's really not worth it. Especially considering how fast the boot time is on this drive with USB. It's slower than my internal drive, but much quicker than I expected it to be.

psmith2.0
2012-04-03, 09:39
Good info/advice, guys. Thanks. This is strictly to be my sister and her family's Time Machine backup drive. Chances are it'll never be used (hopefully) and it won't house media or video/Photoshop files they're working on, etc. They're not that type of user. It'll primarily be a one-way transfer (backups from iMac to drive) and maybe the occasional retrieval of an accidentally trashed document or whatever.

So outright speed/performance isn't really a requirement or concern. Just something that will back up and store all their music, photos, documents.

They've really taken to this iMac (I knew they would), and, as expected, their digital camera (and the camera on her and her husband's iPhones) are now seeing quite an increase in use (iPhoto is to thank for that).

Both she and her husband each about about 6GB of music, and the kids are constantly using a free drawing/art app and making stuff all the time, etc. so the content is piling up (but I can't imagine it ever topping 50-75GB...at least not anytime soon).

Which leads me to another question: the iMac they got has a 500GB hard drive. What's the "rule" on backup storage, keeping in mind the above? They don't have/use any of the Adobe stuff or even Office. They're using the core Apple onboard apps, plus a few Mac App Store downloads (Angry Birds, art software that the kids play with, etc.). Most everything they do is online/Internet-based, minus their music library (which isn't really expanding at this point, but they'll have photos to add over time).

I was simply looking at a 500GB drive, knowing that they'll never use up anywhere near 100GB, all four of them, in three+ years. They just can't.

Am I able, should I find a good deal, to go below that 500GB mark, knowing the above? Are you able to have a backup drive with a capacity less than the computer it's backing up? I know, among the geeks and know-how types, it's not ideal. Or even recommended. But they're none of that.

I'd like to keep this below $100, so I'm not going over 500GB no matter what. But can I go under that to, say, 320GB? Or is that just pushing the luck?

I've got a 320GB hard drive on my iMac. I've got a 1TB WD external drive for the past 2-2.5 years. In that time, with all the stuff I do (Photoshop, Illustrator, iMovie, a 16GB music library, a 15-20GB iPhoto library, many smaller files and documents), I'm only eating 250GB out of the full 1TB, with 750GB still free. There's no way in hell they're going to be dealing in the file sizes and revisions I often do, so I was just curious what's the "lowest" we could go to back their stuff up but still be safe?

If 500GB is smartest/safest, I'll stick with it. I just keep seeing good prices on 320GB drives all over the place, including locally. If I could get them using Time Machine for $60-ish vs. $90-ish, it might happen sooner. But if that isn't recommended, I'd like to know.

I keep telling her "do this before something goes bad - lightning hit, hard drive failure, etc. - and you lose everything...it happens, trust me."

PB PM
2012-04-03, 14:07
General rule of thumb for a backup drive is to, at the very least, have double the capacity of the source drive. In this case that would mean 1TB. If you are paying $100 for a 500GB drive, your looking in the wrong place. I can get a 1TB backup drive for $100.

psmith2.0
2012-04-03, 14:35
I was just kinda looking locally, really.

I got MY 1TB Western Digital desktop drive (power cable) for $99 at Walmart a few years ago. When I look there - or other places: Best Buy, Office Depot, Target, etc. - they're all in the low-mid $100's.

Maybe mine was on sale and I just forgot.

Dorian Gray
2012-04-03, 15:13
I say go for the cheap 320 GB drive, given the situation you've described. There's no harm in doing that if they're going to have significantly less than 320 GB of data to back up. Since you estimate they'll use 100 GB, I think it's a safe choice.

More space on the backup drive just means Time Machine can store stuff further into the past before deleting old files to make room for new stuff, thereby allowing you to retrieve files you deleted last year, etc.

Hard drive prices still haven't fallen to pre-Thai-flood levels, which might be why you got yours cheaper.

psmith2.0
2012-04-06, 17:00
I was going to post this as a Genius Bar thread, but I'll just roll it into here and keep it all together...

This weekend I'll be going to my sister's to set up their Time Machine. It's a four-user iMac (sister, her husband and their two kids).

What's the best, most efficient way to go about this with so many accounts?

My sister is the primary, most-used one (she's an admin, and so is her husband), but she's on the thing far more so I kinda consider it her computer.

I'll format the drive...Mac OS Extended (Journaled), correct?

Basically (beyond her initial backup (I'll go ahead and let it do the entire system I guess), I don't want it to do this on all four accounts. Is the system smart enough to know not to do this?

In fact, I question the need to do everything (the system, the applications, etc.) and would, instead, just want to back up each users Home folder, which will contain each users documents, music, photos, preferences, etc.

Either way - doing the entire system or not - how do I go about doing this in such a way where I'm not duping the entire system/applications four times, beyond maybe that initial one with my sister?

I know they have that interface in the Time Machine system preference where you "exclude" items from backup, but I've always thought it would be easier to check with things you did want backed up.

Anyway, I'll be doing this in about 24-48 hours, so any help/tips would be swell.

I've set up Time Machine a half-dozen or more times, of course. But it's always been for me or other single-user machines. I want to do it on this four-user iMac, but without unnecessary, space-wasting duplication of the system, libraries, applications, etc.