[gbouchar]

I am a 1 years Mac user waiting for his iBook to come.

I was thinking about an external hard drive and maybe and extrernal DVD burner (i will be using them on 2 Mac)

It seem we can use external enclosure with internal hard drive and DVD bruner.

What to look for?

I'd like to be sure to buy things that work with my mac.

Am i better to stay with already built external hard drive ?

Let me know where to look if it is an already common question.

Thanks.

Guy

[theyoda3]

Build both drives yourself and save some money. Get a Seagate hardrive. They have a five year warranty and a good reputation. For an enclosure you could try the 3.5" and the 5.25" enclosures by Macally. They will work for Mac and they seem pretty good. I don't really have any recommendations for DVD burners, tho. Build that with the Macally 5.25" enclosure and you could save money. There are other good enclosures too, but I've only had experience with Macally. Shop around tho. Check Amazon, New Egg, Circuit City, CompUSA, and other electronics stores for some deals. Many times you can get good rebate deals. Also, as a word of advice, set your external drive to master using needle-nose pliers or tweezers. That should save you some time figuring stuff out. Also, buying OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) products can help you save soem money. These products are just the bare bones. No software or manuals, but in many cases you don't need that stuff. The enclosures should come with all the cables you need to connect the drives. You might want to get the DVD burner retail to see if you can get a copy of Toast or soemthing. I'm not too sure about the DVD drive.

I hope this helps some. I know this information has been posted throughout the forums, but I thought I'd help you out based on my own experience.

[Franz Josef]

Originally Posted by gbouchar Am i better to stay with already built external hard drive ?

Hello Guy. Whether you should buy a ready made harddrive or build one yourself will depend on (1) your budget and (2) your technical skills. It is cheaper to build your own but if you have never done anything like that before then you will have to search the forums here and do some reading in advance.

If you are going to buy a drive, look at the Apple Store website in your country to check for Mac-compatible drives. LaCie drives are good and I would recommend that you buy one which has a USB and Firewire 400 connectivity as this will give some flexibility.

Are you sure you need an external drive? What is your iBook harddrive capacity? If you buy or make an external drive, bigger is better if your budget will allow this - you should perhaps try to have a drive with say 200GB+ capacity. This will mean you do not need to supplement it anytime soon.

[admactanium]

putting together an external drive from parts is about as easy a tech task as you're going to get. all the plugs basically only fit where they belong and it saves you a good bit of money. i just built an external raid for my powerbook. i've built a number of externals before and they're a breeze. only downside to the raid i just built is that i had to replace both fans with spendy quiet ones but now it's working great and is quite quiet.

[gbouchar]

I know i can do it technically (i was modifying and updating PC) but what i'd like to know is what are requirement.

Do any ide hd or DVD burnur will fit? Do i need a mac compatible usb external box to fit a mac compatible dvd burner and so on.

I just want not to do mistake from buying incompatible parts.

Thanks

Guy

[admactanium]

there really isn't a compatability problem that i've found. i've built about 4 firewire cases for hard drives and burners and have never run into a compatability problem. with hard drives there's definitely no issue. burners, i suppose there migh be. i haven't built one for a burner in a while since i just started buying machines with them built in.

[Frank777]

I recently bought a Maxtor Hard drive at Costco and put it into a Firewire case I had lying around.

My Sawtooth G4 can see only 128GB of the total 250. But you're probably okay in this regard, since your iBook is brand new.

[FFL]

Actually, Frank, it's a deficiency of the case you had lying around. Older FW-IDE bridgeboards only read drives up to 120 GB or so. A newer case with ATA-133 compatibility would let you use the whole drive.

Consider this a potential reason for buying a pre-assembled drive, rather than trying to save $30* by assembling parts.


[small] *actual amount may vary due to your locale and the parts pricing/availability therein [/small]

[gsxrboy]

I dont mind the lacie triple interface units myself.. FW800, FW400 & USB2 very handy to connect to just about anything.

[admactanium]

i saved a good bit by assembling a striped 600Gb external fw800 raid.

[GSpotter]

External hard drives should be no problem if you select a rather current enclosure (with corresponding chipset). I recently bought two Raidsonic Icy Box 360 enclosures


They are available in different interface variants (USB, Firewire, both, SATA) to use my old IDE drives (I switched to a G5 with internal SATA-drives).
Installation was a matter of minutes.

An external DVD drive might have some compatibility problems with some Apple apps. AFAIK, some applications only work (at least out of the box) with an internal DVD burner, but there might be some workarounds (like patchburn).

[Frank777]

Thanks FFL. Good to know.

I used to have a 40 GB in the case, and figured I'd just add the new drive.
Given that I already bought the drive, I'll pick up a newer case later on.

[infoterror]

Originally Posted by Franz Josef LaCie drives are good and I would recommend that you buy one which has a USB and Firewire 400 connectivity as this will give some flexibility.

...unmatched excellent quality record on external Mac drives too, going back to the 1980s.

Can't beat that.