best 1 tb external hard drive for imac intel?

Hi I am in the same situation, the WD My book works, was looking last week, I ended up getting a Lacie Roughbook because I wanted the firewire 800, the Mybook studio from WD has firewire 800 as well, but costs a bit more. Good luck.

I'm also in the same situation. However, be careful with WD: on the SuperDuper site (and also somewhere on the WD site allegedly) it states that WD drives (including the Mac/Studio versions) are only half-compatible. By that I believe that they will work as backup drives but won't definitely be BOOTABLE. A lot of people create bootable clones for their Macs using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Apparently this is not always successful with WD Mybooks.

Most external hard drives should be compatible with your iMac however you may need to reformat the drive if it comes pre-formatted for Windows(which is easy enough to do). Also know that some drives are designed with auto power features where the drive does not have a power switch and is just supposed to power on/off automatically with your computer. However these are the drives that most people have complaints about. My recommendation is to get one that has a power switch instead of the auto power feature. I would also get a FireWire drive over a USB only drive. The Mercury Elite drives from OWC are of excellent quality and are designed primarily for Mac users: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/400+USB2/

George

As George mentions the Mercury Elites are very good as are the Lacie drives. What ever drive you decide on I would also recommend getting one with FW 800 for it's speed.

I like the WD, but you should get one with Firewire 400/800. I initially had the WD for Mac with just USB and I had problems with it.

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I have four WD MyBook Studio Edition 1TB drives. They are working well now, but before I installed a recent firmware update, they were freezing up. One of these drives has 2 SuperDuper bootable partitions.