Amano

I'm looking to purchase an 80-120 gb external hard drive for data transfer (~40gb) and for backup purposes. I have some questions I'm hoping I could get some answers for.

1) I will need to transfer data from a Win2k PC to a OS X 10.4 iBook. I see a bunch of hard drives boasting mac and pc compatibility, but then I read a review of a Maxtor drive that you have to format the drive properly in order to use it with a Mac. So my question is, when a drive is mac and pc compatible, are they necessarily compatible at the same time? or must they be formatted properly to each OS individually? Will I have problems if I copy my files from my PC and try to plug the drive into my iBook?

2) I'm looking to spend under $100, and so far I've looked at two drives with rebates that place them in the $70-80 range: Maxtor OneTouch and Western Digital Dual Option. However, I've heard customer reviews that these drives have been failing after 4-6 months, which is concerning if I want to use the hard drive for backup purposes. It's also surprising because I thought Maxtor and Western Digital were some of the best and most reliable hard drive manufacturers. What are your opinions on this? Is this just a vocal minority, or should I look for other brands?

Thanks in advance for your advice. I'd also welcome any other recommendations and suggestions you may have

maleficent

I spend a lot of time at various customer sites and am always taking a copy of a database back with me - these databases can be anywhere from 100 gig to over a terrabyte... I will usually Fedex a drive to the site to do the backups so I don't have to carry it.

Maxtor drives (she says knocking on wood) are extremely solid, take a lot of abuse and I have complete confidence that they will work every time i plug them in (and this is also taking into consideration a lot of shipping of this disk, and I know FedEx isn't going to be gentle with it) My current workhorse is about 1 year + old - -and has never given me any problems


I've also used La Cie drives which I would never ever reccommend to anyone. Those drives had some major issues if they were disconnected from the computer incorrectly - the entire drive would be corrupt and all data on it would be unusuable.

If you are using a drive for both mac and PC you should be able to partition the drive so that both OS's can connect without a problem.

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Gatorade Frost

I bought a Maxtor two weeks ago and I'm still trying to get it to work correctly.

I'd say no to Maxtor, but that's just because it's being a pain in the ass for me.

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StanT

I'm using a USB 2.0 250G Maxtor one touch to back up. It's not as fast as I expected, but the reliability and ease of use are excellent.

Amano

Will one partition be Mac-accessible only and the other PC-accessible only? Because if so, then it sounds like i really can't use the external hard drive to transfer files from my pc to mac.

spindles

Format it as FAT32. this site says OSX supports FAT and FAT32 partitions.

Google is your friend

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asshopo

Being that OSX is BSD based, can't it mount drives at NTFS? Or is that still experimental with writing like the drivers are for Linux? If not, go the fat32 route as someone else suggested.

Anyhoo, I got this unclosure that works with firewire and usb2 and got a Western Digital (yes, I know their nickname is Will Die, but I've not had issues with any WD so far) and have used it for about 8 months now, taking it to familys houses to install stuff and back and fourth to work, etc.

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Amano

Thanks! But if I format my external harddrive as FAT32, will it still be compatible with my NTFS-based Win2K computer?

steveincolumbus

Simply, Yes...

I just bought a 120 gig WD usb2 drive for 29.99 from officemax....

They advertised a 120gig usb/network drive for 39.99 and had sold them the day before the sale for the sale price, though they were not suppost to... I was there for the store opening last sunday and the assistant store manager let me and a couple others have $100 off our choice of evternal disks....

spindles

Win2K and XP can read and write FAT, FAT32 and NTFS, so no problems at that end.

The site I posted above said OSX can read NTFS, but not write, that is why I suggested FAT32, which osx can read and write.

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MiSo

i bought a 180 gig drive from ebay for $160 last year.
great deal imo.

i'm sure you can find a good deal on ebay.