What kind of external hard drive for a macbook would you suggest?
When it comes to external hard drives there are two main options; ‘portable’ and ’stationary.’
The portable drives are 2.5 inch hard drives that are usually enclosed in smaller pocket sized cases, many of which are powered either the USB cable or via a second USB cable. These will usually be a bit more expensive than a 3.5 inch drive.
Stationary drives are 3.5 inch hard drives, which makes them larger, and often are powered by an external power cable. You can drag these hard drives around with you if you want, but it’s a lot more work than if you have a portable drive.
For a laptop user, I would definitely recommend getting a 2.5 inch portable drive. When I had a laptop I got use to being able to take my computer with me wherever I went. When I got an external drive for my laptop I felt like I had to leave part of my computer at home every time I went somewhere.
That said, if you are looking for a hard drive to use for backing up data, I would immediately recommend a 3.5 inch drive. A hard drive sitting on your desk is more likely to have a longer life span since it won’t be jostled about in day to day use.
When you get a new drive, you probably want to get a drive with at least as much space as your current drive. Be warned however, that drives with very high storage capacity are a mixed blessing. You can fit a lot more on the disk, but if something goes wrong, you can potentially loose a lot more data.
Remember, a portable drive is more likely to be dropped, lost or stolen. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.
The new Solid State Drives (SSD) don’t have any moving parts, so they can be jostled around without the fear of losing data. The tradeoff with these drives is that they are more expensive per gigabyte and currently can’t match the sheer size of the standard drives. Unless you are really worried about your data, I would hold off on getting these drives yet.
I would not worry about brand name when looking for a drive. I have heard good and bad things about every drive manufacturer out there. Every now and then a drive company has a bad batch of drives, but most consumer drives will be about the same.
External drives come both Off The Shelf or in Do It Yourself form.
Off The Shelf: If you want fast and easy, you can get a drive from the local Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc… you get the case with the drive in one easy to unwrap package. There are some pretty good deals out there on drives right now. A good 320GB drive is usually pretty fairly priced.
Do It Yourself: If you are looking to save a small bit of money or are looking for something more specific than whatever the local market has on the shelf you can go to sites like Other World Computing or NewEgg and buy both a hard drive and external case. Other World Computing just announced a new external drive case for laptop drives. The case comes in black, grey or white and only costs $19.99.
*Do note, there are currently two types of hard drive connections. IDE and SATA. IDE is older and SATA is newer. If you buy your enclosure separate from your hard drive, make sure the enclosure and the hard drive have the same connectors.*
I usually buy my drives and my enclosures separately. It offers a bit more freedom and allows me to purchase cases that look nice. I like my technology to look stylish and the off the shelf solutions just don’t do it for me.
Personally, I think if I was going to buy an external drive today, I would put this drive in this case.
