Hardware :: MyBook External Hard Drive - USB Or Firewire?
Mar 22, 2009
I am in need of an external hard drive for backups of my new 24" iMac due to arrive on Wednesday March 25. I am moving from the PC works (old Dell) and will need something larger than the old one I have for the long term. I have an old external hard drive case and a 250GB ATA hard drive inside I can use for the time being with the new Mac if I reformat it.
That said, I would like to get a drive that is at least equal to what is in the iMac with is 1 TB. I have read a lot of postings and believe I will get a Western Digital MyBook for Time Machine backups (unless someone has a better alternative). Is there any reason to get the Studio 1 or II (FW 800) over the Essential (USB 2.0) for my purposes - backups only? The price difference is $40-80 for equivalent drive space with connections being the difference.
View 4 Replies
ADVERTISEMENT
Mar 16, 2012
I have my iTunes Library Folder on my external hard drive which is a WD MyBook Live.I did this to save room on my macbook's hard drive. It is great and I successfully moved the folder over and saved tons of space on my hard drive.The problem I'm having is that each time I turn on my computer and open iTunes for the first time it asks me to manually locate the iTunes Library Folder.I have gone in and reset and updated the physical location of the folder to the external hard drive but it still makes me go and manually find it before it will open.Once I do that it works fantastic.
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8), WD MyBook Live External Hard Drive
View 7 Replies
View Related
May 21, 2010
I have a few macs running Tiger and Leopard and do not have a hard drive that is filled to more than 20GB of the capacity. Looking for external hard drive solutions. I have found a couple of very good drives that only have FW 400 and USB 2.0, one in particular is a older model G-Drive 500GB for $50 that is supposed to be quite reliable. These drives are being blown out due to newer ones have esata and fw 800. Would I see a difference in speed cloning or backing up to a a fw 400 drive even if I get a newer mac that only has fw 800 ports and I use a 400-800 adaptor? The better drives are faster 7200 RM vs the slower 5400 drives, mostly portable that I have been looking at. I have been reading posts that for applications such as mine I would not see a difference. For the most part I use the computers for office related tasks including Word, Excel etc with not much else, although I have some different utility programs. I just want a bootable drive should my hard drive fail. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my drives. My main comp has two drives where the primary is cloned to a secondary, but want a external that I can easily plug into a new mac and clone the hard drive in that Mac to my external drive!
View 2 Replies
View Related
May 3, 2009
If I connect my Western Digital 500 GB external hard drive up to a computer using the USB port, then can I daisy chain a firewire camcorder to the hard drive and use it with the computer? Or is that impossible?
I hate the fact that the Macbooks don't have firewire, other then the white one. or the Pros.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Jul 23, 2009
I just got a new hard drive for my Black macbook 2,1 and no i need a good external hard drive to put my old hard drive. Do you guys have any recommendations, I'd like to get something that has firewire and usb.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Jul 1, 2012
I have a Firewire 800 external hard drive and need to connect to my new MacBook Air. Where can I get the correct cable?
View 1 Replies
View Related
Nov 6, 2010
I have a 2010 macbook pro with snowleopard on it & have a 7 port ac powered usb hub hooked up to it. If I plug in 1 or more external hard drives into the hub & have them working together/transferring files, will there be a big slowdown?right now my hard drives are in just usb 2.0 enclosures. Would it be worth upgrading their enclosures to firew wire - esata? would I feel a performance difference?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Oct 1, 2008
I'm looking for a way to connect an external bus-powered Firewire 800 hard drive (Glyph Portagig 800) to an iMac which only has Firewire 400 ports, and still powering the drive through just the Firewire connector.
All I've found are Firewire 400 to 800 adapters, allowing Firewire 400 peripherals to be connected to computers having only Firewire 800 ports. I need the opposite of course.
Where can I get such adapters, and without sacrificing bus-power?
View 23 Replies
View Related
May 15, 2009
So here is my bright idea. I still may want to have Windows on my iMac for work projects *sigh* I think I came up with a solution, I rather not partition my iMac (when I buy it) 1TB drive for Windows. Don't want Windows on my main disk - I need the storage for Mac things, personal stuff etc. Is it possible to boot from a Firewire connected external HDD to run Windows?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Jun 9, 2012
I have a late 2009 iMac with Firewire 800 input on the back. I have a Western Digital Passport external hard drive with USB Micro-B input that I would like to connect to the Firewire (4 USB inputs aren't nearly enough on the iMac). I can't find an adapter to do this. As an alternative, is there an adapter that will convert the Firewire 800 to standard USB2.0?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
View 1 Replies
View Related
May 13, 2010
I have a 1TB MyBook from Western Digital. When I connect it via Firewire 800 to my MBP in Windows 7 (Bootcamp) it is recognised but when I start copying (read or write) it just hangs after a while or becomes very slow. If I connect it via USB it works. Do I need some drivers ? If yes, where can I found them? I found this on WD but I have the previous generation i.e. without the digital screen. If I go to the software download, it says that the drivers won't work with the previous gen.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Sep 15, 2010
Had a hard drive failing/failure. I am having my bad hard drive replaced with a bigger hard drive. (New Obviously) I have an iMac. (1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 17-inch) To have my data transferred from the old drive will cost over a hundred bucks more. I am trying to save money but transferring it myself. All im looking to transfer is my photos. I did not have an external drive but i WILL purchse one now. My question, (to save some money) is how would i transfer my old pictures from my old drive, too my new installed hard drive. Can i use USB? Firewire?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Sep 9, 2008
I am having trouble saving anything to my external firewire hard drive. This started a few weeks ago. I am able to retrieve use but not modify any file on the drive. I have tried changing permissions but no luck.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Jun 5, 2009
I've been looking at a number of different Firewire 800 enclosures to use with my new Mac Mini and I have seen lots of complaints with almost all the enclosures that I have investigated, including the Newertech MiniStack v3 which I thought should be a good one. A recent enclosure I came across that I haven't seen any bad reviews about is the Icy Dock (MB559UEB-1S). I'd like to know if others are using this and what they think about it. The next question has to do with the type of hard drive to put into the enclosure. Is it worth getting a high performance drive, or will the Firewire 800 interface be the bottleneck even with an average speed drive?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Sep 6, 2010
Has anyone seen anything indicating that there are any new (higher capacity) drives on the horizon in with a 2.5" external FW800 format?
I'm slightly confused why many of the big brands have stopped at 500GB or 640GB drives in their FW800 models. The G-Drive Mini only goes to 500GB, while the WD Passport Studio stops at 640GB. WD do have 2.5" drives at 1TB, and have dine for months, but they're only available in USB2 models.
Any ideas why they all seem to stop short of their highest capacity drives for the faster interfaces? The only ones i can find with 1TB 2.5" drives are the Seagate GoFlex (which i'm not sure about with the swappable interfaces, i've nearly bought one a couple of times but then changed my mind at the last minute), or a couple of companies i've never heard of before who have drives way above the expected price.
Ideally someone will have seen news from WD or G-Tech or someone indicating that new products are on the way. Otherwise, i may end up having to get the GoFlex.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Dec 18, 2008
my friend of mine has a external Seagate 500gb firewire 400 drive. It is used for storing audio for his production studio and so has critical data on it. I was transfering some programs to him and plugged it into my Late 08 macbook pro. Everything went ok. The power cable came slightly loose which cause the lovely 'you failed to eject disc properly' error. It then would not mount on my macbook or his G5 (single 2ghz). We tried three different cables. Tried to see if Disk Utility would see it, nope. His other firewire drive mounts fine on both machines as does mine. The Seagate drive can be heard spinning up when the power is turned on. Seems to be a dead Firewire interface on the drive enclosure itself as nothing will mount when using the drive to daisy chain. I was thinking of opening the enclosure and installing the drive as a standard sata internal to get at the data. Warranty doesn't matter just the data.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jan 17, 2009
After a fiasco with two firewire hard disks (the courier company lost them), I have to purchase an external firewire HD. Once the insurance company refunds my money (which can take up to 90 days), I still want to get the other 2 disks I ordered. Is there a limit on how many firewire drives I can daisy chain? I was thinking on having all 3 hard drives daisy-chained to my iMac.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Nov 30, 2008
My external drives transfer very slowly on my MacPro. I've been searching for answers and have turned up very little.
Just to make a note, I measured my disk speeds with both AJA System Test and copying files between drives and reading the Disk Activity in Activity Monitor.
I have 3 external drives, all MyBook Premium or Professional, 1x 500GB, 1x 1TB and 2x 1TB in RAID 0. I had them on Firewire 400 and the RAID 0 2TB one on Firewire 800. My transfers on FW were all around 24MB/sec on all drives (much less than what I should be getting with FW400). I then read somewhere that the FW bus on the MacPro uses the slowest speed connected for all FW connections. So I unplugged everything but the FW800 Raid 0 drive and my transfer rate jumped to 40-60MB/sec. This is much better, but still about half or so of what I expect it should be producing from an external RAID 0 setup.
To keep my FW800 backup drive faster, I've plugged the other two into USB2.0. The transfer speeds on both drives are now hideous, around 10-15MB/sec. This is so slow, but I'm not sure what to try to fix my speeds.
The HD's in the external drives are all 7200rpm, and all should be transferring at a higher rate. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Ideally I'd like to get everything transferring at rates they should be transferring at, but I'll settle with my current FW800 speed of 40-60MB/sec if I can get my other two drives transferring at a non-snail pace.
Is this a common issue? I can't believe I'm the only one plugging multiple external hard drives into their Mac Pro. I hope someone has a fix or solution for this. I'm all ears!
System: Mac Pro (early 2008) Mac OS X (10.5.5) 3.2Ghz 8-core - 16GB Ram - 4x1TB SATA - GeForce 8800GT - Dell 30" 3008WFP A02 - Gateway 21" FPD2185W - 3xMyBook external drives
View 8 Replies
View Related
Feb 21, 2009
Macbook Pro 17" Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz. Following a logic board replacement for a separate issue. I have two external Firewire 800 Hard drives (two separate brands and sizes) which have suddenly started unmounting randomly and giving the 'hardware removal error'. A few seconds after unmounting they mount again, only to unmount a minute later with the error again. It is now doing this in a loop.I have done the following things:
1. rebooted and checked all cable connections
2. I have tried this with the two disks plugged in separately and daisychained.
3. I have tried two separate Firewire 800 cables.
4. running the Disk Utility.
5.installing the system from scratch on a freshly formatted internal disk.
6. reinstalling again with an archive and install.
Everything seems to work fine with a Firewire 400 connection.The only software setting that I changed is to disable the "Put Hard Disks to Sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver system prefs. Any connection? I have enabled this again and so far (a couple of hours) so good.Should I be looking at a hardware issue
View 5 Replies
View Related
Jun 29, 2014
I want to get one of those hard disk 'holders' that allows you to plug an internal-type hard disk into the USB or Firewire port of another laptop. I want to know if they need to be specific to the type of hard disk/laptop or if they're more of a one-size-fits-all type of thing. The hard disk is a solid state type that I installed in a mid-2010 model MacBook which has now failed. I want to connect it to a 2005-model PowerBook G4. Can this be done and what do i need to buy to do it?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Mar 8, 2008
Can I boot to an .iso on a firewire drive? I've been having trouble with my disc drive lately, so this is how I'm trying to work around it
View 1 Replies
View Related
Sep 24, 2009
I want to know if it is possible to go from my MacBook Pro to a firewire hard drive to a usb hard drive. I have a LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk (1TB) with eSATA, 2 FireWire 800 (9-pin), FireWire 400 port (6-pin), and USB ports and a 3 year old Western Digital Drive with only USB. Is there a way for me to connect them together so I am only using one port on my macbook pro?
No idea if this matters or not, but I have partitioned the LaCie drive in half for 1/2 time machine back up and 1/2 other. My Western Digital is only one partition all all three partition are in Mac OS X Journaled. A new enclosure is an option if that would make a difference and I can find out what type of drive my WD is if that would help. I have the info somewhere.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jan 9, 2011
With a firewire drive, can I have the drive hooked up to my iMac via firewire, but also have it accessed through USB to my Time Capsule for wireless access?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Jan 24, 2009
I'm thinking of getting the new MacBook which only has USB ports. I have a Firewire/USB hard drive that I'll connect via USB. Can I connect another HD that's firewire only to that drive?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Mar 8, 2009
I've been thinking about getting a Harddrive Dock. I had a Seagate External USB 2.0 drive but in windows, I didn't get more than 40MB/s which is slow. The Macbook Pro's have Firewire 800 which I think is significantly faster than USB 2.0. I also found some HD docks with firewire ports. So, what kind of speeds can I expect with firewire ports? On another note, I wish the macbook pro had an esata port!
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 22, 2010
I have a powerbook which I've been told can only boot it's OS through firewire only. My question is can any of you recommend an external firewire hard drive? I'm after a 1TB of storage as anything smaller isn't ideal. I don't want to spend bucket-loads, but I know that the option of firewire costs more, so I'm prepared for that. I've been told not to buy any Western Digital drives as they don't like to be used as a booting drive (for older macs I think anyway). I also wanted to know, could I used the hard drive to boot my OS from and also use to to save additional files, or is that a disaster waiting to happen?
View 9 Replies
View Related
Apr 9, 2012
I'm selling my Macbook Pro and the buyer said when formatting my harddrive, I don't need to reinstall the OS (10.6.8) because he is going to install 10.7 on it. This is good news for me because I don't have the OS installation disk anymore. I read somewhere that it could be possible to format my hard drive using another Mac (my roommate has a Macbook so that works) but I can't seem to find exact instructions.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
View 2 Replies
View Related
Nov 16, 2010
im looking for an external enclosure that provides a firewire option for my macbook pro. The reason i am doing this is because my macbook will randomly eject my usb powered one for no reason. I have been reading that firewire does not have this problem. Im only looking for an enclosure as I replaced my stock 320gb hardrive with a 64gb ssd for my main drive. Preferably something in the 30$ range because im a poor college student . Anybody know of a good enclosure to go with?
View 5 Replies
View Related
Feb 5, 2010
I recently bought a VANTEC NexStar 3 NST-360FBSU-BK. In the exclosure, I have a SATA drive capable of 3.0Gb/second. It's attached to my Late 2009 Mac Mini via FireWire 800. Based upon my understanding and in this situation, the FireWire should be the bottleneck. Therefore, I should be enjoying bandwidth somewhere shy of 800Mb/second. nfortunately, I'm not getting any where near that speed. I can transfer a 726MB file in 18.6 seconds. According to my math, that's ~5808Mb/18.6 seconds = ~312 Mb/second. This is not even FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 speed.For completeness sake, I also just upgraded from 2GB of ram to 4GB (both PC8500) but nothing seems negatively affected (in fact the computer is much, much more snappy!).
View 7 Replies
View Related
Apr 24, 2008
After one of the security updates to OSX 10.3 my OWC Neptune firewire external harddrive quit showing up on the desktop and I can't find a way to access it.
View 1 Replies
View Related
