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Best Portable Hard Drive for Mac?

geoff_hartwell

Asked by geoff_hartwell,

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geoff_hartwell Veteran HFCer

geoff_hartwell

Posted
Posted

Hey there -

Looking for a portable mac hard drive for music, mobile recording, general use. Firewire, bus powered, 500GB+.

Thinking about the "LaCie 500GB Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive". All my previous LaCie drives have been reliable, and I had a bad experience with a WD drive.

Who's got a favorite?

:lol:

Geoff

10 answers to this question

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mathman Veteran HFCer

mathman

Posted
Posted

I use various brands of usb 2.0 drives for storage and backup, but for sample storage and recording audio or video I prefer LaCie. I did get a LaCie 2 gb drive that turned out to be two 1 gb drives connected to a simple raid controller to span the data over the two drives. Wouldn't allow the drive to boot the mac. That's been my only complaint about lacie.

kenjones Veteran HFCer

kenjones

Posted
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I don't ever really need speed on my laptop (yet), so I went cheap and bought this. It fits in the a laptop bag nicely, has FW800 and is $99. The downside is that it is only 5400RPM and only 500GB. I only use it for "sneakernet" to clients.

I don't own this or this, but I know several guys that have these and love them for video capturing and editing. They are a little bit more expensive, but they are 7200RPM and from what I understand the G-Technology stuff is very durable.

specialk Veteran HFCer

specialk

Posted
Posted

I don't own this or this. They are a little bit more expensive, but they are 7200RPM and from what I understand the G-Technology stuff is very durable.

Those are great prices on the G-Tech drives!

I've gor the 500GB one for my desktop backup. @ years and not a hiccup. Highly recommended, but not sure how portable they are.

geoff_hartwell Veteran HFCer

geoff_hartwell

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Yep - that's a concern. And even though both the G drives need an additional power supply (not bus powered) worth looking into for general backup, for sure.

For video capturing, you mean on-site mobile recording, yes?

All good stuff. Any other ideas?

:lol:

Geoff

JohnnyB Veteran HFCer

JohnnyB

Posted
Posted

Yep - that's a concern. And even though both the G drives need an additional power supply (not bus powered) worth looking into for general backup, for sure.

For video capturing, you mean on-site mobile recording, yes?

All good stuff. Any other ideas?

:lol:

Geoff

Well, in spite of your negative experience, I'm using a 500GB WD portable drive (powers off the USB port) with great results. I don't know what your setup is, but my MacBook only has a 400 mbps Firewire port; not the 800, and music playing back from that drive (from lossless files) sounded very harsh and lacked all the low level detail that makes recordings sound musical. The Firewire 2.0 drive is a little faster than the lower speed Firewire, and in my case, sounds significantly better.

Furthermore, I just took delivery of one of these and it may be the best $10 I've spent in audio. Notice that one end terminates in the standard Toslink plug and the other looks like a mini-plug, but the hole at the end of the tip houses the other end of a fiberoptic bundle for optical digital transmission.

27015a.jpg

The headphone output jack of the MacBook (and other iMacs--check your manuals for verification) also doubles as a digital optical output. This cable enabled me to extract the digital stream directly from my MacBook and plug it into a Toslink digital input on my big rig (big-ass 7.1 ch 1400-watt HT rig) and it's the best sound I've gotten off a computer yet. I'll have to do some more careful comparison listening, but my initial try indicated that it sounded noticeably smoother and more musical than the CD player.

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