More Mac 101, our series of basic tips for new and returning Mac users. Since most Mac models don't offer extra drive bays, external hard disks are the way to go for adding vast storage capacity to your computer. External HDs are great for storing large projects, moving huge amounts of data from place to place, or backing up via Time Machine. Hard disks are a commodity product nowadays: the market is flooded with a cornucopia of options, most of them cheap and easy to install. So which is right for you?
The trick is this: find out who makes the actual hard drive inside the external enclosure (that is, inside the nicely-designed plastic or metal box that sits on or under your desk).
It's what's inside that counts, and we'll explore after the jump.
Graphic designers I know swear by their LaCie drives, for example, which use component disks manufactured by Western Digital. Western Digital, Seagate, and Hitachi typically have good reputations among the small group of IT people I talk with. Your mileage may vary, of course: I had a new Seagate disk give me terrible drama just a few months ago.
A well-designed enclosure is more than just eye-candy, too: you want to find one that offers plenty of thermal protection (like vents and even small fans). Fact is, semi-pros can buy an enclosure separately, and replace the less-expensive "guts" when it's time to upgrade. CoolMax makes a great enclosure that I use every day: the CD-311. It has all the connections I could possibly want, and I can even hook up my MacBook's hard drive to it.
Most external HD manufacturers offer a variety of connection options, such as USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and (more recently) eSATA. For a Mac, typically, FireWire 800 is the fastest connection method -- if your computer supports it (aluminum iMacs, MBPs and Mac Pros do). FireWire 400 ranks second, followed by USB 2.0. Even though USB 2.0 has a faster rated transfer speed (480 Mbits/s versus 400 Mbits/s for FireWire), many Mac users have found that FireWire has a faster sustained throughput than USB 2.0.
eSATA drives are compatible with your Mac, but only if you have an eSATA adapter. Installing one isn't difficult, but it's beyond the Mac 101 bailiwick. Apple doesn't include built-in eSATA ports on new Macs yet. eSATA offers a connection that's over four times faster than FireWire 800.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that whatever you buy, chances are it will start giving you trouble in about four years. As someone who has personally witnessed dozens of hard disks give their dying last breath, hard drives are consumable storage just like CDs and DVDs. They wear out over time, and it's best to replace them before problems arise. In fact, for mission-critical data, some IT pros recommend replacing hard disks as often as once every 12 months.
Backing up data is important, but backing up data to a reliable device is golden.
(Full disclosure: Iomega, a manufacturer of external hard disks, was a client of mine from 2002 to 2007. Iomega drives use both Hitachi and Seagate components.)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
5-07-2008 @ 4:08PM
john w said...
Good Article. I have two ext. Hard drives on my iMac. One for safe copies of Aperture libraries and various other stuff. The other for Time Machine.
Question. The time machine drive is a iomagic 250gb drive that worked great for a year. It now somehow goes to sleep on its own(never did before) and time machine ends up in a loop waiting for the drive to wake up. Anyone have ideas as to why this is happening?
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5-07-2008 @ 4:29PM
Robert Palmer said...
This may be an obvious thing to check, but in System Preferences, under Energy Saver, make sure the "Put the hard disk(s) to skeep when possible" box is not checked.
Other than that, I'm at a loss. If your drive has multiple connection options, you might try using the other one, whichever one that is.
5-07-2008 @ 4:40PM
Michael said...
I had the same issue with a WD disk I had in a RAID array with another LaCie drive. Whenever I would restart my Mac Pro, the drive would magically unmount itself, through going to sleep randomly. I never figured it out... your file system is already Mac OS Extended (Journaled), because you're using Time Machine... I would contact the manufacturer of the drive. In my case, I did just that... and ended up buying another LaCie to replace the WD.
5-08-2008 @ 8:30AM
c wright said...
Lacie? don't think so know to many professional photographers that got burned. What good is a warranty if your on your third one. Name recognition and quality are two different thing, remember your running os X not Vista
Anything with a WD Caviar you may as well be writing on paper thats burning on the other end, in my experiences. High end WD drives like the Raptor drives are good but not the low end
granite digital are great but OWC has good drives also.
Note: use Firewire and always reformat new drive's to a Mac format
5-07-2008 @ 4:31PM
Eleventeen said...
I usually pair WD and Seagate drives with Macally external cases. Their semi-pricey, but main shell is aluminum and they've got connectivity options ranging from USB to Firewire to eSata and even a NAS type device as well.
The new WD 640 gb (the WD6400AAKS) is basically their 320gb single platter drive doubled up, perpendicular recording and all that jazz.
I actually had a LaCie that had a drive go bad after a good solid year of use and repurposed the case, all you really need is a couple of old credit cards, steady hands, and some patience.
Since I have a 15" MBP, the best I've got is FW400, but I'm seriously considering getting an ExpressCard eSata adapter, since I've got some free eSata ports on my other boxes I could move the data around with.
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5-07-2008 @ 4:31PM
boogle said...
I'm in the video editing field, and we typically swear by LaCie and OWC drives... Oft heated discussion, as a lot of people trust LaCie, while others of us (myself included) have had way too many LaCie enclosure failures to ever trust them again. However, one important thing to add to the list of things to look for (especially if you're doing anything where data throughput, error rate, &c. is important) is who manufactures the chipset for the interface - regardless of name brand of the enclosure, we're always sure to look for enclosures using Oxford (911/924/934) FireWire chipsets. Not something that most would need to worry about, I know, but worth a mention.
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5-07-2008 @ 4:49PM
DistortedLoop said...
Amen! And read and read and read any reviews on the external enclosure you're thinking of getting. I have a Mac Pro that I installed a SATA to eSATA cable in (Mac Pro has two open SATA ports on the mobo for optical drive upgrades).
When I went eSATA drive shopping, I ran across Seagate Free Agent Pro series. Ah, Seagate, great brand, all my internal drives are Seagate, must be a good buy. WRONG! Nothing but a nightmare of kernel panics and lost drive access with those Free Agent Pros when using the eSATA port on them.
Turns out that many in both the Mac and Windows world suffering the same issue, and it's because of a bad design or firmware bug in the Oxford Semi controller unit that's in the FAP's enclosure which causes eSATA flakiness. After months of trying to work around it, the only working solution was to rip apart the FAP and take the Seagate drives into a different enclosure. No problems that way.
Funny thing is that the same model Seagate FAP attached to my TIVO eSATA has worked flawlessly. I wonder if the TIVO forces a slower connect speed or something.
Anyways, point of checking the reviews on the drive well taken.
5-08-2008 @ 1:36AM
Jeff Forbes said...
I've also had too many problems with LaCie drives to ever trust them. The first one I bought failed while still under warranty. It was replaced by LaCie at no charge, but the replacement also lasted less than a year.
I've switched brands.
5-07-2008 @ 4:33PM
Zeromaru said...
I use a 500 GB LaCie external drive (internally Samsung), partitioned for 80 GB Time Machine and remaining multimedia storage, and it works great. Sadly, space is already running out so I may be upgrading the insides to a 1TB soon.
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5-09-2008 @ 5:49PM
Ed Quar said...
i'm about to partition my 500GB external for time machine and storage. i have a 200 GB hard drive in my mac. is 80GB enough for time machine to use? at first i was going to split it 300 storage/ 200 time machine. but after reading your comment, i wanted to ask you if you had any suggestions. thanks in advance.
5-09-2008 @ 8:31PM
Zeromaru said...
I only have Time Machine backing up my Home folder, which only includes my documents, pictures, websites, code, and personal settings. I explicitly excluded all my media (since it's on the same drive anyway), downloads, virtual machines, system directories, pretty much anything easily reobtainable or is reasonably large I don't back up. I usually have on the order of 20-40 GB free on the 80 GB partition.
5-07-2008 @ 4:34PM
Jonathan Wise said...
A warning about LaCie drives. YMMV -- I personally have two of them and have had no problems -- however, at our church we purchased 8 of them for moving HD video between campuses. 6 of them died within a month. We weren't especially kind to them, but we didn't abuse them either. They'd get unplugged, put in a car, driven 10 miles, and plugged back in again.
All 6 were unrecoverably toast. They'd mount, but you couldn't open the drive to look at its contents, or even inspect the partition map in Disk Utility.
Good looking enclosures though, plenty of port options... just think twice if you intend them to be portable.
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5-09-2008 @ 10:58AM
Sam Katz said...
did all of your employees properly unmount (eject) the disk? e-mail me the answer.. I'll be curious.
5-08-2008 @ 7:53AM
Jonathan Wise said...
Can't find your e-mail address, but yes we did (all 3 of us!) We're not newbs :-p
5-07-2008 @ 4:34PM
Mario Panighetti said...
My advice: buy the hard drives OEM and install them in enclosures yourself. The standalone drives generally have far better warranties, and as far as I can tell, Seagate's 5-year warranty is the best in the business.
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5-07-2008 @ 4:39PM
Eleventeen said...
I couldn't agree more. After my LaCie failure where I found out that even though it was a WD disk, WD wouldn't cover the warranty on the drive because it was a direct OEM drive.
That's why I started going with the Macally cases and DIY'ing it.
Seriously, if you can turn a screwdriver you can build your own with better drives cheaper than you can buy a prepackaged one.
5-07-2008 @ 4:45PM
Robert Palmer said...
I agree with Eleventeen ... I love my enclosure. It's part of my "Mac Triage Kit" when friends need help. For the basic basic user, however, even a simple enclosure may be too much.
5-07-2008 @ 4:49PM
Mario Panighetti said...
I dunno, they make some pretty simple enclosures nowadays. Macally has some nice screw-in-and-go ones now, pretty sturdy design too.
5-07-2008 @ 4:37PM
Jemaleddin said...
I made a horrible mistake a while back: I was trying to upgrade to Leopard on my mini, and instead it installed on my Firewire drive (guess I should have checked those options more closely). Now I have to turn the drive off every time I reboot. Any idea how to fix that?
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5-07-2008 @ 4:41PM
Eleventeen said...
Why don't you use something like SuperDuper and just clone the FW drive back to the built in?