Which external hard drive for Tiger Imac?

Firewire is faster than USB. Any external drive is fine. No matter who makes them they are just a case and a hard drive. Hard drives all come from a handful of manufacturers. Dozens of companies make enclosures, even custom made ones. You can buy an enclosure and a hard drive separately and just put the hard drive in the enclosure. This way you can pick the enclosure and the type of hard drive you would like. Just get an enclosure that uses the Oxford chipsets. You can buy enclosures that support ATA or SATA drives as well as Firewire 400, 800, and USB 2.0 connections.

Might I suggest one of these...

http://eshop.macsales.com/Item_XLR8YourMac.cfm?ID=8750&Item=NWTMS2F7500G16

Ive just bought a 1TB WD (Western Disk) My Book portable Hard Drive from PC World for a bargain £139 online price!! Not received it through the post yet so cant comment!!

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/035562

Yeah BDaqua, except Charlotte's Notes is in the UK according to the info and imagine extra for shipping and import duty. Then there's also the voltage difference... 😉

Isn't that Upper Kentucky?

OOPs! 😟

Charlotte's Notes:

PowerPC Macs will not boot from USB devices, so you need an external FireWire HDD. While the drives themselves are manufactured by a few manufacturers, the critical component in these devices is often the chipset or the firewire bridge. This is the component that communicates between the Hard Disk Drive and the computer. Look for a drive in an enclosure with the more reliable Oxford 911+ chipset.

Apart from that any external firewire Hard Disk Drive will do the job.

Good luck.

cornelius

This seems to be one of those double postings that have occurred several times today and I have a complete response in the other series of responses.

Anyway, I recall saying that you should definitely go with Firewire since USB won't let you boot. I recall a series of posts about some Macs having had problems with Firewire booting from MyBook drives, but I don't have specifics. You can search for other discussions regarding MyBook drives.

Message was edited by: Limnos

Hi

I bought a nice cheap Firewire enclosure suitable for sata drives ( same type as inside my iMac G5 ) .... looks like this one same make etc, but would need to check model no's etc to see if it's the exact same thing.

Anyway, was very cheap from some UK online supplier, & works faultlessly with both the iMac & Macbook pro. Minor advantage was that if the iMac internal gave up for good, I could be up n running from firewire ( assuming a recent backup) in minutes, or even swap the actual drives over in only a little longer.

That enclosure & a 250GB Western Digital boots the iMac and the Macbook pro ( intel of course ) via Firewire - the drive is partitioned for each .

That was the cheapest way I found, but does need some err assembly.

andy:

Any firewire external firewire HDD will boot a mac if properly formatted. However, I have personally seen a few failed firewire bridges, and have responded to questioners who had the same issue, where their computer could not read the FW HDD. In most cases this was shortly after the warrany expired! Replacing the drive in another enclosure solves the problem. That is why to be forewarned can avoid that fate: get an HDD with the Oxford 911+ chipset.

Cheers 😉

cornelius

umm, well, Apple say

"If you will use a volume as a Mac OS X startup disk, click Options and choose the appropriate partition scheme. To use a volume to start up an Intel-based Mac, choose the GUID partition scheme. To use a volume to start up a PowerPC-based Mac, choose the Apple partition scheme."

my point about that was that despite being 'Apple partition schemed', not GUID... the volume starts up an Intel mac.

andy:

I am not up on Intel macs, or GUID. My understanding of GUID is that it does not have to do with starting up, but with how the format encodes, stores and accesses data. So while you may be able to boot from the Apple partition scheme, there may be issues to be dealt with later. Again, I am not well versed on this, but I suggest that unless you have specific reasons for wanting to use the Apple Partition scheme instead of GUID...

Incidentally, my point in my last post had to do with the hardware aspect of the question, and not the format or partition scheme.

Cheers 😉

cornelius

Yeah, funny thing about that GUID, I heard that you just couldn't install to an APM, but you could boot from it!

Just got an IntelMac, and upon installing the Leopard OS to a USB RAID of 4*4GB Sticks... there was no GUID available in DU anywhere I could see!? Yet it installed to, and boots from the USB Pens fine with just HFS+ selected to start with!?

BDAqua:

I did a bit of research on GUID, but found it a bit more technical for me. I guess I had better do some more homework.

Good luck.

cornelius

Yeah, funny thing about that GUID, I heard that you just couldn't install to an APM, but you could boot from it!

Any Mac running Tiger or later can read or write GUID or APM disks. The only restrictions are:
1) PPC Macs can boot only APM.
2) Intel Macs can install OSX only on GUID (but current models can boot from GUID or APM).
3) Any drive larger than 2TB has to use GUID.

Just got an IntelMac, and upon installing the Leopard OS to a USB RAID of 4*4GB Sticks... there was no GUID available in DU anywhere I could see!? Yet it installed to, and boots from the USB Pens fine with just HFS+ selected to start with!?

You have to use the "Options" button in Disk Utility's "Partition" tab to get the GUID and APM options. (You can still leave it as one large partition.)

Malcolm:

Thanks for the very concise summary. It is very helpful.

cornelius