Hardware :: Unable To Work With External Drive Choices
Feb 9, 2010
I need advice on purchasing an external drive for back up purposes. I just got a 15" MBP 2.8 500GB after getting some great advice from the group. I currently have a WD My Book Studio 1TB, which I purchased after a WD drive appeared to loose my information. In addition, I had a lacie drive that died several years ago, so I am not so confident in the external drives, so I want a secondary drive for the extra security. I went to purchase the same WD drive I got a few months ago, but learned that it no longer is sold because the drives have been updated, and not for the better.
Ideally I would love to get a small drive that is 1TB that I can keep in a safe box, in case of the unexpected. I haven't been able to find any smaller portable drives that are 1TB and the 1 WD I found seems to be a no no. Something stable and reliable would be great. I am planning to begin using TM for backups.
I bought my 13"MBP about 2-3 months ago. I mainly use it for uni so It's back and forth (great portability). But I am looking into getting a monitor for my setup at home. I have the hdmi adapter + HDMI cable which I use to connect to my tv in the living room. (52" Bravia). I am looking to spend about $150-$200 no more then that. Apple monitors are out of my price range.
I also have a few questions. - Is it better to get a monitor with HDMI? - Is vga/dvi good? How is it for those who have it? - Is there much difference between 1600 x 900 and 1920 x 1080? - Will my MBP look fine on any of these monitors?
I'm praying someone can give me a miracle cure here but im pretty sure its a terminal case. i have a 24inch iMac 2.66ghz core 2 duo and a western digital 1tb external usb hard drive....this hard drive was bought a month or so ago with the sole purpose of store years and years of media to free up valuable space on my iMac hard drive....tonight without any warning at all the drive icon disappears from my desktop with an error message and now refuses to load, when i click initialise on the error dialogue box it takes me to disk utility.
in disk utility i have tried repairing disk and i get the message "invalid node structure". it then tells me it cannot be repaired and i need to re-format my hard drive.
as i said there is literally YEARS of info on this drive that i really really dont want to lose, is there anything i can do, or anything worth trying. as a side note on the front of the drive it has a capacity gauge and has gone from 3/4's full to not showing anything.
i have just bought and external hard drive and want to put stuff on it. i know i hav to format it somehow using disk utility on my imac. what do i format it to so i can use it on both mac and pc? it is set to read only in "get info" and ms-dos fat in disk utility.
I have a brand new MBP. I have a 1tb external drive with 250gb's of music. I have it attached to my mac via USB. I CANNOT GET ITUNES TO CREATE A NEW LIBRARY ON THE EXTERNAL DRIVE. I CANNOT DRAG AND DROP OR ADD FILE/FOLDER.
But get this, I hook it up to my old Dell and I can do whatever I want. I am friggin pissed that I spent all this money on Mac equip and can't get it going. You may have seen my other post where I posed my issue of: 1tb ethernet drive hooked to airport extreme. Above mentioned 1tb hooked up to back of it via usb. I am completely unable to copy, move, or add files using my mac. But guess what. my pc handles it easily and quickly.
I recently bought a macbook pro and am making the transition from a pc to mac. It's all gone well so far, but I'm not sure what to do with my music. I currently have about 200 gb of music on my external hard drive (connected to my pc.) The internal hard drive on my pc does not have space to accomodate the files on my external.
I do not have the "Copy files to iTunes music folder" currently enabled because my internal doesn't have space. (And I like having the original music files in a separate location as I have over 30,000 songs). I don't know how to transfer my external and music to my macbook, since I will have to reformat the drive (which would erase everything on it, therefore I somehow have to make a backup either on my mac or on my pc. but what to do about the iTunes .xml file and iTunes folder on the internal pc drive??).
Whenever I add a new external drive (be it for regular use or just backup) the OS will read the entire drive to create an index. With smaller drives this was just an irritation of 20-30minutes ..but now I have a RAID5 with 4 2TB drives. This will be 4-5hours of non stop noise ?
Is there a better way to do this on a schedule ..say use the drive now and then set it for indexing over night ?
I have created a image of my macbook pro (2006), on a DL-R disk. (This was so that I can restore my mac without having to do any updates or having to download and install programs) However, the person who made the image for me is no longer available and as such I have no way to use the DL-R disk. Apparently the macbook pro 2006 cannot read DL-R disks. I know that apple has a networked optical drive feature for the macbook Air. Would I be able to use this feature on my macbook pro?
when I turn on display info my hard drive counter is messed up. It displayed it correctly a couple of times randomly but usually it just looks like in the attachment for the most part.
My iMac is slowing down and I wanted to upgrade the RAM and upgrade to Snow Leopard from Tiger. Here are the specs: Version 10.4.11 Processor: 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Memory: 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
I want to back it up before I upgrade to Snow Leopard. What external hard drive do you recommend? The only things that I want to put on it are my pictures from iPhoto and music from iTunes. I have 12GBs of music and 1,109 pictures in iPhoto. Also, how do I go about getting these things onto the external hard drive? Will it mount on the desktop and then I just drag my files into it?
I have an LG 16x external drive. Will this work with the MBA for tasks such as installing system software? For that matter, apart from unpowered dvd drives, what else does not work with the MBA's USB port.
OK, I read about formatting Fat 32 to transfer files. I will try it tomorrow. My other question has to do with using this for backup. it is a 750 hard drive and I was wondering if I should do anything special if I want to use it for both Timeline and video storage separate from timeline.
which external hard drive (for backup purposes) or empty hard drive enclosure (so I can buy my own drive and install) to get for an iMac, which meets the following criteria:
- has Firewire 800 (or Firewire 800 and USB 2) - stylish to look at (preferably matches the current iMac) - has a good quality, reliable hard drive (no cheapo Maxtor drive or whatever) - preferably is bus-powered (saves yet another wall-wart and power cable)
If it comes with a drive mechanism it should be around 400 to 500 GB.
right, i have a HFS formatted 500gb external drive which i use everyday, but today spotlight just keeps indexing it, it has a lot of media on it which i access daily so spotlight is needed to search it.
I am having a heck of a time trying to get either a brand new Lacie d2 Quadra OR a G-Tech G-Drive (both 2TB desktop models) to work on my iMac via the Firewire port. Mac is running 10.7.3, 2.8ghz Intel Core Duo.
Both drives are brand new out of the box.
When I connected them using Firewire they look like they mount, but they are unusable. They won't unmount if I try to reformat. Get error messages if I try to reformat, verify or disk repair. Messages say something about not being able to read some information. Keep in mind there's nothing on the drives. I have tried getting them to work with Time Machine with no luck. A few times it would backup for several hours only to give an error message and crash. Something is clearly wrong when I use Firewire.
But when I connect using USB? Voila! No problems at all. Repair, formatting, storage, etc. all work fine.
What the heck is it with Firewire? I am dealing with slow transfer speeds for now, but I'd really like to have them connected via Firewire and off my USB ports.
I have zapped the PRAM and permission module to no avail. Not sure what else can be done.
ive just got my mac book pro and was wanting to transfer all my music from my Windows Laptop, i have a Toshiba Stor.e Canvio 500gb which i have put allof my music onto i plugged it into my macbook via usb and nothing seems to happen the mac doesnt show any sign of the HD what so ever, is there anyway i can get this to work ??
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
When ripping CD's with my new iMac 20", occasionally a CD will start to initialize then it will disappear from the desktop. I can eject the CD using Disk Utility or even using the hard-button on the Mac keyboard but other than that it is as though the CD is not there. Then, when I put the CD back in again all is well and it comes right up. I have never had this problem with the same CD twice in a row.
Also the drive seems really picky - iTunes will hang when trying to rip a CD that is at all "well used" (OK I don't take care of my CD's as well as I should but they work fine in my Windows machines).
My backup external hard drive hasn't work since I installed Snow Leopard. Bad:( I am still learning about my MAC and would just like to re-format the hard dive and set everything up again. I want to upgrade to Lion but can't untill I backup what I.
I am looking to buy an external hard drive for my intel Mac and MacBook Pro to download and save some 8,000 plus photos. My computers only have USB 2 connections. I am finding that most new external hard drives have USB 3 connections. Can I use an external hard drive with a USB 3 connection on my older Mac computers? If so do I need an adapter to connect USB 3 to USB 2?
i have just bought a liteon external dvd/cd writer and plugged it into my imac. (os X 10.9.2) it is not loading correctly - it just shows up as a folder where i cannot open any of the files. i desperately need to install my printer.
I have a western digital hard drive that had previously been working flawlessly on Lion, however when using it with Mavericks it had suddenly stopped working meaning it would no longer be found on the desktop or in finder. I have been using the hard drive as a time machine backup. the obvious next step was to launch disk utility and look for a solution. I have found there two hard drive names in disk utility, the first is the HDD name of Western Digital and the second is the "Time Machine" partition. Running first aid on the partition resulted in an error and that the disk could not be repaired. This HDD is important and the data cannot be lost.
I have to have my hard drive replaced on my Macbook Pro. I bought an external hard drive (Buffalo) plugged it in and nothing no pop ups for instructions. Does a new hard drive (external) need something done to it on first time use?
I'm just about to receive my new Core i7 iMac with a 2Tb Hard Drive and was just wondering whether I could use my old 1Tb Hard Drive for Time Machine Backups.
As far as I know the requirement for a Time Machine Backup Drive is that the drive is at least the same size in terms of capacity as the internal HD of the system you're planning to back up.
I would really like to use my old drive as 2Tb external drives with FireWire 800 are in the 200+ region on Amazon and I'm not sure I would like to spend that much at the moment.
After debating the need vs. want of the iMac and Mac Pro, I'm going to follow my brain and go with the iMac (27" i7) since I use it for work, though my work is in the business side of the music industry dealing more with email, spreadsheets and some minor music/photo/video editing (which is easily done for me via Apple`s iLife).
My real question is with the 3 external hard drives I want to buy - G Tech 1TB G Drives. I read about daisy chaining the drives, which sounds like a good idea. But am curious about it. Obviously if I have 3 external HDD's and want to use FW800 on all three of them, with only one FW800 on my computer, daisy chaining solves the problem. But in this set-up, what is the potential downside to this? Is there an upside or other reason(s) people daisy chain their drives, too?
I`ll use the iMac's HDD, of course. But I also need one HDD for work (important files, contracts, etc). One for personal (music, photo, video). And lastly, one as a back-up for the other HDD's.
What would my BEST and also cost effective option be? Buy 3 externals and daisy chain them? Use eSata (what would that entail)? Increased speed would be the only major plus I'm looking for with setting these HDD's up. Just not sure all my options...
But keep in mind I don`t need them to mirror each other. HDD 1 (iMac) has my minor importance stuff. HDD 2 has my work files and business stuff. HDD 3 is personal photos, videos and massive iTunes collection (300gb). And HDD 4 is a back-up of all the others. Raid seems to be not exactly what I need - perhaps overkill on cost, too. What do you think? Also, I know everyone has their taste in externals. I actually had great reliability in Western Digitals MyBook Studios, and My Passbooks. But some people I know had good time with the G Tech`s - aside from them looking cool.
when you have TC or AEBS and have a usb hard drive hooked up to it. What is the difference between going to Finder and doing a Connect To Server to map the drive versus having it show an AirDisk?
Somehow I just cannot have my external drive show up as an AirDisk.
