I have a 27" iMac with four USB external hard drives attached. The drives are working fine, but one of the drives takes a long time to wake up after it hasn't been used for a while. The other drives are accessible from the Finder almost instantly, but this one drive causes the spinning ball for about 10 seconds before it is accessible. Not a BIG deal, but it happens all the time even after relatively short periods of inactivity.
I thought maybe I could uncheck the "put the hard disks to sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver preferences. But this would presumably affect all of my drives (including the internal) and that might lessen the longevity of the drives, right? Are there any options for just turning off the sleep for this one drive, or perhaps a way to shorten the wake time?
I've had a lot of problems with my iMac G5 power supply and since I have newer computers I've decided to get rid of this computer.
I want to save the hard drive and put it in a case, then use it as an external drive on my other Macs.
What sort of case do I need to shop for? Should I look for SATA or what exactly is the proper nomenclature.
Is USB 2 the preferred choice, or Firewire, or what? Is there a USB 3? I use a mid-2010 27 inch iMac with the intel processor, and I needed to buy an adapter to use my older Firewire external drive. Is Firewire a dodo?
Lately I've been using my external hard drive as the main drive of my imac I5 and every day it freezes when I open 3 or 4 apps or more or while doing several stuff at the same time. This, obviously, doesnt happen when using the internal hard drive of the imac, so I suppose is due to using firewire 800 or usb 2.0. Is it normal for every external hard drive to freeze when using it as the main drive or maybe is it that my external hard drive is bad?
I'm planning on buying a more quieter external hard drive to use as the main drive of my imac, but I wont do so if it also keeps freezing every day. Any suggestions? Is it normal even when using firewire 800? When using the external hard drive I umount the internal drive of the imac. Maybe this is the reason? Its a Lacie Big Disk 500GB. Would an external SSD make a difference or would it still freeze?
I'm curious what people use for external storage on their iMacs. I have a Mac Pro which is getting a little long in the tooth. I'm debating whether to get a new Mac Pro or to get an iMac, which would be a pretty good speed bump from my Mac Pro 1,1. I'd get the ssd drive, and the 2TB harddrive and get aftermarket RAM. But what I like about the Mac Pro is the upgrades you can do. And I like the four hard drive bays, for storage and backup. I've got over 3 TB of photos and music/tv/movies, so I'm going to need an external drive. In addition, I'd like to be able to backup everything. Is there an elegant way to do this on an iMac with an external drive that isn't super loud and hot?
my mac has a pioneer dvd drive in it and it wont read my dvd+r dl and I am wanting to burn a mac os 10.5.dmg to it and install 10.5 but the dang thing is ejecting it. So what should I do to get it to work get the external dvd and run it from it or get a external hard drive and try it that way.
I don't know if this was covered or not, but I couldn't find anything on it. I have an external hard drive that is formatted to my PC. I want to use it for my Mac but I can't edit, delete, copy files because it's formatted to my PC. Now, is there a way to format it to Mac without taking everything off and putting it back on?
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.
First let me say I just bought my first mac yesterday and I LOVE it! i am so glad i am finally using a mac!
Now onto the little issue:
I have a 500gb external hard drive with a Music , Anime, Books, and Movies folder. I tried deleting the music folder and I could not, so I used my old vista laptop with the hard drive and deleted it. Then I plugged the hard drive back into the mac, now there is a $recycle.bin folder that i can not get rid of, i can put it in the trash, but can not empty the trash.
I tried downloading NTFS-3G Stable Read/Write Driver, but it does not do anything.
For some reason my Lacie external drive that's hooked up to my imac is constantly being read for no reason. It's never idle and never rests until I eject it. I'm afraid the drive's gonna fail soon and all my work gone? Did a search but can't find anything online.
I recently bought my first imac. I seem to have an issue about copying movies from my imac to an external hard drive.I try to ''drag and drop'' but nothing is happening.I also tried to copy the movies and then paste them to the hard drive but no luck either.
I have had this WD "my book" ext. HD for about a year without a problem. Today after restarting the computer I got a notice, instead of the HD icon. On screen I got a box that said "the disk you inserted is not readable by this computer" below this was 3 options. Initialize, ignore, eject". I was afraid that initialize would erase or reformat the drive so I pressed eject, I've tried many times but still the same thing. Has my ext. HD died? Should I click initialize? All my backup data & time machine, music,etc., is on this drive, I don't know what to do.
I have an Intel iMac with with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on separate partitions. Recently I have acquired an external USB hard drive. I formatted it with Ext4, and installed Linux Mint to it.
The installation went smoothly, but I can't seem to boot from the USB drive anymore. Holding down Option on start-up only gives me two choices: Mac OS X and Windows. The drive isn't recognized in either operating systems anymore: on Snow Leopard I get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and on Windows, it doesn't even show up in My Computer.
My new iMac is arriving tomorrow and I need to transfer everything over to it. I know about Migration Assistant, but I want to know if there will be any complications due to the data I have on an external hard drive.
Specifically, I currently have an older (white) iMac hooked up to two 2TB external hard drives. One if for backup but the other one has all my iPhoto and iTunes content on it, including about 1.5 TB of movies and TV shows that I have ripped. None of this material is on the computer's internal hard drive - it is all on the external hard drive.
Because my new iMac has a 2 TB internal hard drive, I want to transfer all the iPhoto and iTunes content currently on the external hard drives onto the internal hard drive of the new iMac. Will Migration Assistant handle this and will it be clear what I need to do?
I notice that to upgrade the HDD from Apple is expensiva & many has posted picture on how they use a putty knife & replace them with a better & bigger capacity HDD.
I was wondering, for those not comfortable opening up the Mac Mini, what is the difference if we just buy a USB external HDD ? Wouldn't it be the same
Can one external hard drive be used for an IMac and a macbook? I have a TB external HD and so can it be used for both? I just partitioned the TB HD into two, one for my macbook and the other for my iMac...
Also, when I back up using Time Machine, does it back up all the files like iTunes, my video files, etc, etc?
I'm running out of space on my Mac Mini's disk because of all my iTunes video files. I am thinking about buying an enclosure for my spare 1 TB hard drive, and using it as the location of my iTunes library, but I wondered how it works with the Mac Mini's energy-savings mode. My Mini is set to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, then wake when iTunes content is requested by my Apple TV or Airport Express. I like it, because it's very energy efficient that way! My question is, will the disks also sleep along with my computer, and will they wake properly when the computer wakes?
I have an IMAC and I am having problems transferring video files I download to my external hard drive. I had trouble playing the files at first because it was not readable with Quicktime. I downloaded VPN and it played with VPN. I don't want to save those files on my computer so I would like to transfer it to my external harddrive. When I try to drag it over, it won't let me drop it in. I am new to the MAC world. Is there a way to choose where it will save itself right before you download like there is on windows. I click on it and it does not prompt you, it just starts downloading.
I have 2 usb drives attached to my iMac which is running snow leopard. I am trying to share the hard drives so i can install some software on my Macbook but i cant see the drives in my finder on the macbook. I have checked all the settings on my imac and everything is shared properly but i still get nothing.
ive had an imac g4 for 4 years and the other week the logic board gave up, i took it to a mac repair shop who advised me the repair would cost 600 pounds!! i decided its best to invest in a new imac (running snow leopard if that makes a difference) which im going to buy over the holidays.
the old hard drive has been removed,cased and ready to go. i plugged it into my girlfriends macbook which read it as an external drive... great so far
here comes the question. the drive has all my apps and personal bits which i dont want to loose or reinstall. do i simply drag the applications across on to my new machine? primally interested in iphoto and itunes. will i loose these music files and 4 years of photos?, or can i navigate into the app on the hard drive and drag the files into the new itunes/iphotos on the new machine?
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 am a PC user crossing over to the iMac. I want to move my pic on an external hard drive to the iMac. Tried clicking and dragging, but didn't take....what gives?
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.
I bought a WD My Book Essential to do Time Machine backups. It is formatted for a PC but I was told I need to format for my IMac before I can use it. How do I do that? Is it a complicated process? I have only been using a Mac for about a year now and am still learning about them.
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 want the most secure and most protected so I do not have any chance for me to loose my information. I hear good things about g tech, what are your experiences? Should I go with a RAID, will it work with IMAC? I did tons of research and found nothing but conflicting info about each brand. My eyes are bleeding now.
I bought a Guardian MAXimus hard drive and it seemed to be working fine for the past few weeks. Now all of sudden when starting my Imac 27 I7 the grey screen takes a long time then it get stuck on the blue screen and stays like that. Some times after being on the blue screen it will goto the main page but it takes 3-5 min if it does. When it gets stuck, if I unplug the firewire from the back of the computer from the hard drive it boots up. Any thoughts, their tech support wants me to send the unit back with out doing any testing at home to see what the problem is, seems like a pain in the butt.
