Portable hard drive for 10.4.11 iMac

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Level 1

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Portable hard drive for 10.4.11 iMac

I'm biting the bullet and finally buying an external hard drive as back-up. The one that seems to be a good price and get good user comments is the Toshiba HDDR250E03X, about $99 at Circuit City and elsewhere. Anyone think this is not a good one? Other rec's from people's experience?

iMac Core 2, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Sep 10, 2008 3:50 PM

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Answer 1

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Kenichi Watanabe

Level 8

41,572 points

Sep 10, 2008 5:09 PM in response to rollingwoods

If that's a 2.5-inch drive inside, the price is great. It must be a 2.5-inch drive, since it's powered by the USB port. FireWire is typically faster, but if you are using it for backup purposes, USB 2.0 should be fine and USB drives are usually less expensive (like this one) and they are more common. I usually buy the larger 3.5-inch drive for external use with a desktop Mac; they are usually cheaper, faster, and have higher capacity. But this one has a good price, speed is not a big factor for your intended use, and assuming 250GB is large enough to backup your internal drive, I think it is a good pick. And you won't have a big (possibly noisy) "brick" sitting next to your sleek iMac.

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Answer 2

lenn5

Level 4

2,537 points

Sep 10, 2008 5:24 PM in response to rollingwoods

I have one of these OWC portable drives and love it. You can get one with whatever ports you want. I have the USB2/Firewire 400 enclosure. It's bus powered and very quite. Alot quieter than my full size WD Mybook Studio drive.

The OWC drives are alittle bit more expensive than the one your looking at but I wanted high quality for my backup files.

lenn

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Answer 3

rollingwoods Author

Level 1

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Sep 10, 2008 10:24 PM in response to lenn5

Can you tell me what WD and OWC stand for? I'm not a techie.

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Answer 4

lakeshore

Level 2

306 points

Sep 11, 2008 3:47 AM in response to rollingwoods

WD=Western Digital
OWC=Other World Computing

I have a 250GB WD My Passport portable external drive. It's white, so it matches my iMac, but it also comes with an aluminum-look finish so that it will blend in with the aluminum iMac. I keep it formatted in FAT32 so that I can swap it between my iMac and my PC at work. I first tried a larger desktop model, but having it constantly on, and constantly listening to the hum and putting up with the vibration, convinced me to get a portable. I backup my data manually once a week, and that's the only time I plug it in.

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