I need an external drive, ideally something which is quick as well (i.e I want to hold my Itunes music and photos on the drive and Itunes/Iphoto to be able to pull them up quick.

250gb ish...any ideas anyone?

Thanks for your help

Eric

 

Depends if you want to use it with a PC too........

If it's just Mac, then you'd have to reformat it for Mac read/write anyway

Personally I've got a few different ones (western digital, freecom and Lacie)....
All OK at what they do. nowt special though.

Dan

 

Have a look at this. It's the first place (UK based) that I thought to look at.

If it were here then I'd suggest getting a drive (320GB Seagate/Maxtor) from PCCanada and then pop down to TigerDirect and pick up a Coolmax CD-311 3.5" external enclosure (not sure if they are available in the UK), then pop the drive in the enclosure and you're away.

The advantage of the coolmax enclosure is that it will accept IDE and SATA drives, whereas my other external enclosures (1 MacAlly and 1 Ultra Products) will just take IDE drives, and I had a spare 120GB SATA drive sitting around doing nothing. Seeing as most new computers seem to be using SATA, plus the aforementioned spare drive thing, I thought it would be very handy to have an enclosure like this. It features one firewire, usb and e-sata port on the back.

Why the DIY route? Well, it lets you put whatever capacity drive you want in the enclosure, which is always handy, plus it used to be the case that the branded, eg LaCie, all in one things were more expensive than going the DIY route, but that might not be the case these days.

 

Dan has a good point about what platform you're going to use it with too. If it's Mac only then HFS+ will be fine for the format. If it's going to be used by a PC, well, natively only FAT32 formatted drives are read/write accessible under Mac OS X, NTFS mounts read-only. However, as per this thread, a bit of third party software should allow read/write NTFS with OS X, thus meaning the drive could be shared between PC and Mac. One caveat I can think of here is that if you're NTFS, I doubt that Time Machine will allow a backup to an NTFS formatted drive, so if you'd be out of luck if you wanted to share the drive between Mac and PC, and use it as a Time Machine backup volume.

 

Markus its Mac only mate, and its to go with my Macbook-hence needing an 'external drive' if you catch my drift. Can I get a good firewire one?

 

Yes, you should be able to get either a packaged one with firewire, or a DIY one (bare enclosure + drive) with firewire.