external drive suggestions

I have a bunch of LaCie's 2 500 Extreme and a 250 plus an older 120 and a Pocketdrive (with OSX installed, useful to boot up for running Diskwarrior). They are fine though one of the 500's packed in both Maxtor drives at once. Replaced in 2 days by LaCie here with WD's. There was a bad OEM batch apparently. This was some time ago. FW800 is very fast.

D2 is the case configuration with LaCie (e.g. they are all D2, like the D2 Extreme) . Extreme vs. non Extreme refers to the hardware RAID card or interface when they bond two drives into one case. Other than the SATA and a USB one they are all Extreme now it seems.

For portable, don't nkow Firelite but the OWC Mercury-on-the-go are great and offer a 60GB 7200 RPM drive if you want speed. They look good and are small and bus powered.

One thing most people fail to take into account and often wish they had is the amount of noise the enclosure's fan makes. Be sure to check this out when looking at drive, especially the larger ones.

I have a Maxtor One Touch 250GB drive and it's practically silent. This is opposed to my external DVD±R/RW drive which sounds like a wind tunnel.

I think the LaCie 500 is 2x250 HD's put together. My friend has one and took it apart. The larger one could be a same kind of configuration. It crashed but he is a PC guy and had it as a NTFS file system.

FireLite is expensive. You can get the same same or similar configurations from macsales.com for less. I have multiple external 2.5 inch HD's. I usually find the best price on the internet and order online. I then find a suitable case with USB/FW or what ever configuration you want. If you can handle a screw driver you can put it together.

If you want a external USB powered drive it has to be able to run with 500mamp or less as that is the Apple USB bus power. A drive needing 1 amp will not boot from the USB bus without an external power source as a powered USB hub etc. If you go FW then the Apple FW bus will power it.

MJ

Hi Mike,

I wonder which external case have you bought for the 2.5 inch harddrive. I am haveing problem with those cases because the USB ports on my powerbook don't seem to provide enough power to drive the HD and if I use external powered hub and the drive will work for a little bit then the shut down due to lost power. I have a PB 15 AL 1.25GHZ. Thanks!

I now have a Carrier gxm-25c bus powered aluminum usb2 and firewire enclosure that works great with the short firewire cable from Apple and my spare 7200rpm 60gb hitachi hard drive. Firewire runs it without an extra power supply. USB2 needs the extra power supply or additional power from a second usb2 port. (cable one usb2 to drive and second usb2 to power)

I went to the Apple store for service and watched them boot my computer with their external hard drive loaded with Tiger. Their external hard drive, I thought, would make a great backup boot tool but, since it is partitioned, can also back up data. Thanks Apple service.

My question is - can I also run the Maxtor 5000dv the same way? Will Firewire run it without the power brick? Anybody use Maxtor one touch with a PB?