Need a external hard drive

Any brand you like. All will work on your mac. You just have to format it in the mac format, Mac extended (Journaled) in disk utility.

There is no Mac specific external that would work better then any other make or model once they are all formatted for mac os x.

I decided to get a hard drive enclosure after my last Ext. WesternDigital FW drive went south on me. There was no way to replace the drive without ruining the whole unit. I chose the Mercury Elite Pro...highly recommended in my Mac magazines.

The ones from OWC are easy to put drives in, even for a beginner. Easy to understand instructions and they back up their merchandise 100%, no questions asked. Now if a drive goes bad, I can put a new one in the enclosure in minutes (or put a bigger one in). Mine works great!

DALE

I have to replace a 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda7200 rpm eSATA internal hard drive which my son built into a Macally G-350SUA. This was for my Time Machine exclusive back ups which suddenly failed.

Fortunately, I have a 2.5 Seagate Backup Plus 1 TB portable drive that I was using for a second Time Machine back up for such sudden failures!

My questions are:

1. I am trying to decide between The SEagate BAckup Plus 2 TB US3 STCA2000100 which is only half the price at Amazon, OR the OWC Mercury Elite PRO which has USB 3 and eSATA and FireWire 800.

Besides speed, is there any advantage to having eSATA and Firewire 800?

My 2009 iMac is 1TB with one Firewire 800 port and 4 USB 2 ports.

I notice that external hard drives which are sold assembled do not list specs such as rpm, cache, transfer rate, etc. That is one thing I like about he Mercury Elite Pro... I wonder why that is??

2. The other option I am considering is simply replacing the 1.5 TB Barracuda Seagate which my son built into the MacAlly enclosure. However, I read somewhere that the problem could either be in the enclosure or the hard drive within, so maybe I better not do that? But as an aside, will ALL internal hard drives fit into ALL storage enclosures, or are these necessarily manufactured as a pair?

Thank you,

Marietta

FireWire 800 gives you near-hard-drive speed. USB2 gives you snail speed -- Ok for backups, but not for anything else.

There are two rough classes of drives: 3.5" desktop drives include a 12Volt motor and require external power. 2.5" notebook drives use a 5 Volt motor and can be bus-powered if necessary. Within each of those two groups, all are interchangeable in size, and SATA drives are all connector-compatible.

I use MacAlly enclosures with FireWire 800 for full-size (3.5" form factor) desktop drives. They come with the required power adapter.

I use OWC mercury elite Pro with FireWire 800 for notebook-size (2.5" form factor) Hard Drives and SSD drives. I wish they had an included power adapter, as I dislike Bus-powered drives. But the enclosure seem to work well.

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Do not fear replacing the drive in an enclosure. The complexity of a drive is so much higher than the complexity of an enclosure that the failure is almost certain to be in the drive. Use Caution in installing a drive larger than 2.2TB in a five-year-old enclosure, it may not support a drive that large.

Stay away from Western Digital external drives!

I have tried their external drive products over the

years and they all quickly had various issues.

Their bare internal drives may be okay but in my

experience their externals just don't cut it.

Personally, I have several Iomega and Seagate

portables that I use for backup and they have all

performed quite well.

Grant Bennet-Alder, greetings; Are you talking about this? Note the external power connection. Purchase an external power supply if you don't like the bus powered option.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

I use OWC mercury elite Pro with FireWire 800 for notebook-size (2.5" form factor) Hard Drives and SSD drives. I wish they had an included power adapter, as I dislike Bus-powered drives. But the enclosure seem to work well.

I have a slew of these and consider them first rate. The eSATA connection is the cherry on top.

Ciao.

There a difference in which external drive you connect. WD, especially when you install it's "helper" software and the rest, will certainly cause trouble. Seagate can be knicking its head also, but you should not install its software, then it is OK.

BTW I think your MBP has USB3, so that is really fast, as fast as FW800, buy a USB3 disk.

A year ago I bought a retina macbook pro, and an external docking station to use with it. I can really recommend the docking stations, as I just drop a bare drive in, use it, and if I need to archive, I put the drive in the closet. Really fast.

Just another option to consider. I purchased one that was close to this one.

Oh, I have found Western Digital to be a low cost drive that works. I notice there are those who don't like them, but my experience leads me to be willing to try them anytime.

Hugh

Thank you for your reply and primer, Grant Bennett-Alder.. you have helped me a lot.

Marietta

Hi, Grant,

If you don't mind , and pardon my ignorance, but could you please elaborate and expound further on what you mean below "by all connector compatible"?

>>> all are interchangeable in size, and SATA drives are all connector-compatible.<<<

Thanks. A minor point perhaps, but it could add greatly to my limited understanding of the issues.

Marietta

all 3.5" form factor desktop drives are interchangeable in size. They are about 1 inch high.

all 2.5" form factor drives -- that you buy new today -- are thin enough to be interchangeable is size. They are about 9.5mm high or less. Some older drives were thicker (12mmm) and might not fit in some portable computers.

All SATA drives 3.5" or 2.5" connect with the same standard SATA connector.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

I use OWC mercury elite Pro with FireWire 800 for notebook-size (2.5" form factor) Hard Drives and SSD drives. I wish they had an included power adapter, as I dislike Bus-powered drives. But the enclosure seem to work well.

Yes, these are my go-to drives as well! Highly recommended.

I have a 2TB Western Digital My Passport portable external Hard Drive (USB 3.0). Portable means it doesn't need an external power source. I love this hard drive because it has massive storage and is portable. You can get it on sale today for Labor Day on newegg.com here. If you miss the sale I got mine at Costco for cheaper anywhere online. I am very satisfied with this external hard drive and I would recommend it to anyone especially a laptop user since it's portable. The only downside about it is that it doesn't have a Thunderbolt port.

But if you can, I would just get a new internal hard drive. You can get a 1TB hard drive for a really good price these days. It would be much better to have all your data in the MacBook Pro itself than having to have an external plugged in all the time. Trust me, I've tried it with my MacBook Pro. You could check out this hard drive here. And then you can learn how to put it in your MacBook Pro here.

Hope this helps.

hughmass-

The link for your Docking Station is not working.

stay away from WD drives regardless, period

Best 2.5" class HD are Hitachi/Toshiba (both made by Hitachi). Not my opinion but empircal fact.

All HD enclosures on the commercial level are pure junk.

These are the ONLY reliable HD enclosures on the entry level consumer market.

Of course a case is just a case, what matters is the SATA bridge card inside.