External hard drive?

[bigben2wardpitt]

I want to get an inexpensive external hard drive ( i guess newegg would be good to check). I have a built in 250 GB hard drive internally in my Macbook Pro, but want to be able to use time machine. Plus, an external HD to put extra stuff on would be nice. So, i was thinking a 250 GB size or something like that.

So, any suggestions on which HD to get and maybe what size? There are tons of companies out there, and newegg has reviews and such, but i'm jsut worried about reliability and such. So suggestions would be great!

Thanks!

 

[sourceninja]

My research says you should have a timemachine drive at least twice your hard drive size.

I have a 250 gig drive in my mbp. I used a 500 gig usb drive for time machine (ibook from western digital). I am currently using 39.5 gig of space and have time machine set to backup everything except for my downloads folder and a special folder where I store stuff I do not want backed up (temp rips from dvds and such). Currently I am using 37.85 gigs on time machine and have about a week of backups.

Your backup size is going to vary based on what you tell it to backup and how often you change your files. Time machine only stores files if they change after the first backup. So you can have weeks of backups with no increase in storage if you did not change many files. But if you are constantly changing 100meg files, you might find your time machine growing rapidly.

As for reliability, my current plan (and I'm not sure if this will work) is to clone my time machine drive once a month to my network storage server as a image. Then if my usb drive fails, i can write that image onto a new 500 gig usb drive and hopefully my time machine will be restored. I have not yet tested this to see if it will work, but I suspect it will.

 

[dmw16]

I have a 120GB and it was way too little. Drives are so cheap, get a big one.

 

[bearxor]

Best Buy will have a 320GB WD Passport drive on sale for $140 starting tomorrow.

 

[NoelS]

Originally posted by: bearxor
Best Buy will have a 320GB WD Passport drive on sale for $140 starting tomorrow.

bigben2wardpitt,

The Passport is a great drive. Runs on the USB power of the connecting cable,too...

That 320GB will be quite large enough, and that's a decent price, too. The suggestion for "twice the size of the HDD" is because of the way TM saves - it just continues to copy the new stuff and keeps the old stuff, too. So naturally it uses a lot of HDD space to do that. If the HDD gets full, it just lops off the oldest stuff, so the bigger the HDD, the further away in time the lopping off...

Save your money, you don't need a 500GB HDD unless you can find one for the price of that Passport.

Noel

EDIT: BTW, I use 2 externals, one for TM and one for SuperDuper. Both externals are smaller than my 320 internal. I still feel comfortable because I check sizes frequently in Disk Utility to make sure my actual content on the internal will fit on the externals...

 

[Injury]

I scored a free LaCie Terrabyte External from work for time machine. That's always a good deal on a great drive. haha.

For those less lucky, I suggest you get the best external you can afford. Two reasons... one, because you know that if you're constantly needing to delete data from it because you are running out of space then it kind of defeats the purpose of having extra storage space. Two, if you get what you pay for. If you buy the cheapest one on the market, don't come crying when it craps out and you lose your data. I know drives of all qualities are prone to failure, but I've never have a high-quality external casing crap out on me. The drive itself isn't the whole story.