OS X :: Best Bang For Buck FW800 - PATA Hard Drive Chashed
Oct 6, 2010
I got two questions.
1) What would you guys say the best bang for your buck FireWire 800 is? I hear a lot of differing opinions on this one, so I'd like a couple suggestions, need over 500GB though. 750GB and up would probably be the best.
2) I've got 2 PATA hard-drives from my old Windows PC that crashed, what would you guys suggest doing about getting the data off of them? Most of the hard drive kits I found are for SATA, and the one I found for PATA was like $50 at Best Buy, I just want to get the data off these hard drives and junk 'em. I don't need bells and whistles and fancy enclosures.
Bang for buck wise which has a better speed to price ratio? I'm not talking about benchmarks, I'm talking about noticeable performance. I heard some people say that 5400 drives are so fast nowadays that even 7200 drives can sometimes be slower. Is this true?
Also, if it's a 7200 drive, is it cheaper to BTO straight from Apple the 7200 drive? Rather than buy aftermarket? (bearing in mind that I don't need the space of the two drives, so if I buy aftermarket the old drive will end up being unused )
I recently bought the new 13" MBP and have been looking at upgrades. I bought it standard so I could walk out with it that day, but I've been thinking about two main changes: RAM and a SSD hard drive. I'm pretty sure I'll be getting the Intel X25-M 160gb SSD, it looks like the best GB per $ ($424 for 160GB). I know that will show great results. Is a RAM upgrade also necessary for improved speed and performance? If so what is the best RAM to change to? I'm looking at either getting 1 4GB card for a total of 6GB or getting the pair for 8GB. I don't want to drop $300+ if it isn't going to do much for me.
I mostly use the MBP for word processing, internet, email, etc.; but I want a bit snappier and quicker performance than what I'm getting out of stock. It is possible (likely) I will get into music making/mixing on this machine.
The title says it all - getting a 2.4Ghz 13" MBP, 4GB Ram (rarely if ever need more), and thinking of a little boost somewhere over the 500GB 5400RPM drive. $300 for a 128GB SSD is pretty high, especially considering I'll probably max that out far too quickly. Is there any bigger bang for the buck performance upgrade over the Momentus XT?
Whats the difference between a PATA hard drive and an ATA hard drive?
I bought one of ebay for my 15" Powerbook, i got it today, and it doesn't work lol. But the post clearly says, will work with all ibook's, and Powerbooks, So im not sure if it's the right kind of drive. The HD i ordered is on route for a replacement, so hopefully it was just a defective drive.
I bought a MacAlly GS350SUAB hard drive enclosure for the firewire 800 port. Before I made the purchase, I looked around for some FW800 drive xbench scores and found a few results:
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When I ran the xBench disk test on my drive, I was unimpressed. They weren't much better than when I plugged it in using the USB port.
I thought maybe xBench was sucking, so I timed how long it took to write a 831MB file to the drive using both USB and FW800, and it was actually faster (marginally) on USB. FW800 took 30 seconds, while USB took 28. Something doesn't seem right. Does anyone have any thoughts on why this could be? I do have a FW400 audio interface hooked up, but that is of course plugged in to the FW400 port and shouldn't make a difference. The hard drive I'm using came out of a Seagate FreeAgent. Is it possible it's just a really slow drive?
Could anyone recommend an external (FireWire 800) Hard Drive that they're using without issues with a Power Mac G5 (mine is a Dual Processor 2.3)?? I bought a couple of WD My Book Studio Edition but have no end of problems on FW800, and looking around here so is everyone else. LaCies seem to have similar problems, plus my own experiences in selling these and seeing FW ports falling off the enclosure's board, etc., puts me off them. Maxtors seem to have different issues and the new brown and orange Seagates are too fugly to even consider. So, anyone recommend a solution (250-500GB) that works fine with FW800 on a dual PMG5??
I bought a brand new Seagate 400Gb hard drive for my PowerMac G4 MDD FW800. I installed it in the back bay, as a slave drive. When I power on the Mac, I get a blank grey screen. The original hard drive with OS 10.4.11 is set as the master, so I don't know why it won't boot properly. I've checked for bent pins, and I don't see any obvious ones, so I'm completely confuzzled.
This is in regards to the 2010 mini. I have been reading up on SSD, Hybrids and FW800 with a 7200. What is the easiest AND most effective/cost effective solution? If I went he FW800 route, can I use the same drive as my data storage drive? Will there be enough headroom to run the OS over FW and use the drive to stream movies playing in another room on Apple TV2 simultaneously? Will this give me a performance increase over the internal 5400 if I use the external 7200 for everything over FW800?
That is where my thoughts about the hybrid come into play. I know I can stream the iTunes content over USB2, which I have at the moment for the big drive. I would need to go buy an enclosure with FW800 to run it as a boot drive. I could use that same money and go get a 500GB Hybrid drive and install myself and leave the USB2 as data only. If the install is painless but tedious, I might just do that. If the FW800 route would be robust enough to run the OS and stream data to other devices simultaneously (ie use it as I would the regular internal drive), I might just do that and wait for SSD prices to come tumbling down and do a bigger internal SSD in the future.
I may soon buy one of the newer generation iMacs that drop the FW400, includes 800 only. On my current Mac, I have a FW800 drive and a FW 400 drive. I use the 400 for time machine as speed is less important. My current iMac has a 400 & 800 connector. I have tested connecting the 400 to the 800 drive via daisy chaining, so everything is pulling off the 800 connector, so this assures me I can do this with the new iMac. However, Does it slow down your 800 drive when it has a 400 chained off of it? Or, if the 800 is the first drive connected to your iMac, do you maintain full speed?
I just bought a 640gig Samsung 2.5 inch / 5400rpm drive and threw it in a FW800 case from Other world computing. Running some test using the QuickBench 4 and AJA system test shows me that this little bugger is almost as quick as my internal drive on my MacBook Pro (Model number: WDC WD6400BEVT-00A0RT0). How can this be???? I did a varity of test with different file sizes and the Samsung get 70 MB/s vs about 84 MB/s for the internal drive.
My internal drive is pretty full vs this external drive that is currently empty. I do a lot of video work / large gigabyte files on the drive so perhaps I have a defrag problem? I really expected my internal drive to blow the FW800 connected Samsung out the water?
I have been using a MBP for a few months now and I am making a total conversion from PC user to Mac user in January when I buy a nice new 24" iMac but to go with it, I want to buy a couple of new external hard drives. I have currently got a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB USB Drive which is Windows Formatted and I will be keeping that to use with my work laptop (a Dell), and I have been really pleased with its reliability. Anyway, I have been looking around and there are some fab drives on the market but I have a couple of questions. If I get an iMac with a 500GB Internal Hard Drive, how big an External hard drive will I need to use Time Machine without having to delete backups all the time?
Also, I have been primarily looking at the new Seagate FreeAgent drives and the do a PC version (USB) and a Mac version (USB/FW400/FW800), but the 640GB USB version costs �76 whereas the 500GB FW version costs �100. Would you go for the bigger size or the added benefits of FW800? Will I notice much speed difference between USB and FW800?
So I am well on the way towards my 27" iMac. I have just finished transferring my files, work, backups and media from ext4 hard disks to hfs+ (via a combo of an OSX VM for disk util, and removing journaling/file-copying/re-enabling Journaling under ubuntu and the VM.
This has me left with 1.5TB and 2TB HFS+ disks and my old dual bay USB enclosure (an Icy Box). I now need to start looking for a good FW enclosure/s to home these two drives. I have had a look about and the Icy Dock dual bay (supporting raid and also JBOD - important for this) looks like a winner (waiting on techies to answer me about putting drives with data on them in the enclosure in JBOD as I dont want to lose data).
Are there any other options (most of the posts relate to single drive and/or supplied with disk enclosures). I really want something that is FW800 and lets me drop two disks in and just use them.
I may put up a wanted to see if someone has unused enclosures for sale (perhaps where they have removed the disks and put them in their shiny Mac Pro?)
I have two new G-Drives attached via FW800. One drive keeps unmounting by itself. All of a sudden, I get a screen that says "The drive has been removed, you should always make sure to eject the drive properly from the etc etc.." First time I have ever had this problem. I have tried the eSATA connection and FW connection with the same result. Regardless on how I connect the drive, linked or direct. It's brand new. Could it be bad?
so I am in search of a new 500GB-1TB External Drive for Time Machine, and it has to have FW800 as well as USB 2.
I was thinking of getting an external chassis and buying my own hard drive, has anyone purchased a good external chassis with both ports, or a all in one drive that is worth the money?
First I wanted to upgrade my new mac mini with a Momentus XT but now I'm thinking about getting a "real" ssd + a FW800 drive for storage to have the huge speed boost of the ssd drive. Does anybody have this combination in his mini? What I want to know: How is the performance like of the external drive connected to FW800? Is it comparable to a standard internal hard drive?
I have just purchased a WD Studio Turbo extarnal/portable 320GB drive to use as a back-up and spare start-up disk. (I normally run Disk Warrior from an external.)
I have backed up my Macintosh HD to this WD drive using Super Duper and Super Duper indicates that everything has been copied ok.
However, when I plug in the FW800 cable to my MacBook Pro (old version) and restart holding down the Option key it doesn't show up as an alternative start-up disk.
I wasn't sure if it wouls be a bad idea if I wiped the interal hard drive while I'm booting from a recovery disk, then made a RAID 0 with the internal drive and my FW800 external drive. I'm nearing my max for the internal drive. I have a second FW400 drive backing up with Time Machine. I was hoping to just wipe, make the raid volume, and then restore from the Time Machine backup.
I guess even before that, my FW800 is not working in Lion. I reformatted while connected by USB, reset power management, and reset PRAM, but the firewire bus panics and takes out the Time Machine on FW400 as well. Is there a fix for this somewhere that I'm missing? I bought the FW800 drive for the above reason, only to run into a wall trying to make it work. I really don't want to do a RAID 0 with a USB connection.
I'm not going to try setting up the RAID 0 until I get the FW800 drive working reliably, but I was hoping to kill two birds with one stone.
Info: iMac (24-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
First of all, is the interface for the MBA HDD PATA or ZIF or is it the same thing? I'm looking to get rid of my 80GB HDD and would love to get a 160GB but I'm willing to settle for 120GB.
Today I went to plug in my Lacie 250 GB USB external hard drive into my 13 in. MacBook to get a shirt template for a design I am making. I discovered that the hard drive just would not mount and show on the desktop, and I remembered that this happened a few days before, but all I did was unplug it and plug it back in, and it worked... except that today, that didn't work at all. I tried the other USB port, and the hard drive showed up on the desktop for about a second, and then disappeared. I kept on replugging it back into both USB ports, but nothing happened.
Then I tried to see if it would work on the PC beside me, and it was recognized as an external device; however, a message came up telling me the drive was malfunctioning. I am guessing this is from ejecting it incorrectly (because I am in a hurry to head to my next classes...I use this laptop at school), but I have incorrectly disconnected it before in the past and this problem never happened to me before.
Every single project I have ever created for my design career is on that hard drive, and all I want now is to get my files back. All I need it to do is show up on the desktop for just the right amount of time for me to copy my files onto my computer.
I read online to put it into the freezer for a while and it should mount, but that didn't work. I tried using Disk Warrior, Data Rescue 3, and Tech Tool Deluxe, but the hard drive did not show up on any of those apps.I tried plugging the hard drive into an iMac as well, but it did not show up either.
Got a new MBP last month to replace my white MacBook - loving it as an upgrade but one gripe - if I'm sat using it on my knee I regularly hear the "click" type noise of what I imagine is the protection of the hard drive because it thinks it is being dropped.
I never heard this on my old Mac and while it's not a huge issue it is a bit disconcerting, as though I'm being told off for moving it in a fairly responsible way.
My PowerBook G4 (Alum) died. I've had it for 4 years, taken it with me to Alaska and all over the lower 48, and have had nothing but happy experiences. I knew she was gonna go, but I was hoping she'd hold on until I could afford a MacBook. Alas, no. The problem appears to be the ability of the logic board to communicate with the hard drive. I can hear the HD spin, but even with Disk Warrior, I cannot locate it. The Mac Geniuses at my local Apple store confirmed this and gave me a shoulder to cry on. I've run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility, and tried finding it using the target disk mode - no luck.
The problem is that I've got 4 years of teaching materials, 6000 songs, and irreplaceable pictures on the HD, so I can't bring myself to just trash it. It's true that you only fail to back up you stuff once. This is my once. I've heard that with PC hard drives, you can just drop the old HD into a USB HD box and use it as an external HD. I can't afford professional data retrevial, and I want to give this option a try if it'll work with a Mac HD. Any ideas or suggestions?
How do i play media files from my external hard drive without transferring the files to my mac hard drive? I have a lot of media files and want to be able to play them soley from my external hard drive.
I have an aluminum unibody macbook from October 2008. I'm looking to upgrade the 160 GB hard drive inside to a 500 GB one I'm considering from Newegg. Would it be possible to migrate/copy/clone the entire contents of my current hard drive to the 500 GB one? I also have a section of my current hard drive partitioned for Bootcamp. Would this affect my ability to transfer everything over?
If this is possible at all, how can I go about doing so? If there are steps laid out somewhere, I'd appreciate a referral. Sorry if my question is a little elementary, but I did a search on these forums and also google and nothing really came up
I know this is going to be an incredibly easy fix, but I can't find it. The Hard Drive on my new iMac is not appearing on my desktop, nor is it appearing in the "Device" menu in Finder.
