External hard drive for an Intel iMac?

[Tony Sade]

Any recommendations? I plan to use it for the obvious reasons-nothing special. Thanks, Tony

[Mark Rios]

My local Apple reseller, friends of mine, told me to get a La Cie. They say that they find that it has the best MTBF and is very reliable, in their opinion.

hth

[Tim Morton]

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/

I have my eye on this one for my imac.

[Sam Kennard]

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/

I have my eye on this one for my imac.

My daughter has had one of these on her Mac Mini for about 18 months and it works very well as do most of the products at MacSales.

I have several of their larger units on my G5's with no problems.

Sam Kennard

[J D Thomas]

Tony,

I've been using Macs since 1989 and have had several LaCie drives over the years. Like maybe 10 for various different systems. Only one died prematurely, and LaCie promptly replaced it. All the others have been like tanks. I current am running a G5 Quad, have 2 internal drives and 3, count em, 3 external LaCies drives. A 500GB Firewire, 100GB USB portable drive, and a Firewire tape drive for backups. No problems.

One tip, if you're not in any real hurry, go to lacie.com and sign up for their email newsletter/club, or whatever they call it. They send out specials each month and a very good deal can be had by staying abreast of things that way. I got my $180 USB drive for $99 that way.

Just a thought.

[Tim Morton]

Tony,

I've been using Macs since 1989 and have had several LaCie drives over the years. Like maybe 10 for various different systems. Only one died prematurely, and LaCie promptly replaced it. All the others have been like tanks. I current am running a G5 Quad, have 2 internal drives and 3, count em, 3 external LaCies drives. A 500GB Firewire, 100GB USB portable drive, and a Firewire tape drive for backups. No problems.

One tip, if you're not in any real hurry, go to lacie.com and sign up for their email newsletter/club, or whatever they call it. They send out specials each month and a very good deal can be had by staying abreast of things that way. I got my $180 USB drive for $99 that way.

Just a thought.

FWIW...Lacie does not make hard drives....they make cases...or they sell cases that someone makes, and they put a hard drive inside. Could be Quantum, or IBM, or Western Digital, or any number of other brands. Yes they sell good products, but don't buy one based on the assumption that they are selling "LaCie" hard drives.

[Tony Sade]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. Did some more research, read some reviews, and went with the 250 gb MiniStack. There were reasons for the choice, but dang if I can remember.

Talk about inviting disaster, though. Ordered the thing, then started getting what Apple calls a "kernal panic" (leave the machine idle for any length of time, and I get a message is several languages indicating that I have to restart). Calls up the food change, an archive and install, and now I'm told it's a hardware problem which will require either a logic board or hard drive replacement.

Guess I'm really going to need that backup now, eh? Just when I was getting smug about dissing Bill Gates.

Cheers

[J D Thomas]

Guess I'm really going to need that backup now, eh? Just when I was getting smug about dissing Bill Gates.

Everyone has, or should I say: 'should have', some kind of backup plan in place. I learned that a LONG time ago. I use my computer in my home-based studio work and I've had a backup plan in place for many years. I use Retrospect and every morning at about 12:30am my computer wakes up and Retrospect backs up my critical files TWICE, once to an external drive and once to the tape backup, so I can store the tapes offsite. This may seem like overkill to most, but I had to access backup files for clients several times in the past, and I sleep much better at night.

Even tho most don't use their computer for work-related functions, most do have valuable data they'd just as soon not lose. Pictures, mp3s, financial data, etc. Backups can be very simple or quite elaborate. Your choice. It's really a matter of 'when' your computer or drive goes south, not 'if'.

I used to do Mac based consulting for people in the TV and Film industries in SmelLA. Over the 10+ years I did that, I was amazed how many people had no backup plan. Once I laid one out for them, many still didn't backup. Then I'd get a call a few weeks or months later and they were commiserating that their drive died. My response at that point was, 'too bad. Now you know"

Harsh reality.

[Tim Morton]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. Did some more research, read some reviews, and went with the 250 gb MiniStack. There were reasons for the choice, but dang if I can remember.

Talk about inviting disaster, though. Ordered the thing, then started getting what Apple calls a "kernal panic" (leave the machine idle for any length of time, and I get a message is several languages indicating that I have to restart). Calls up the food change, an archive and install, and now I'm told it's a hardware problem which will require either a logic board or hard drive replacement.

Guess I'm really going to need that backup now, eh? Just when I was getting smug about dissing Bill Gates.

Cheers

Kernel Panics are not generally serious....and not ussually related to the MB or HD. How full IS your HD? Have you added ram recently? Luckily you are under warantee....and it might be a good time to purchase "applecare"...you can do that up to a year from initial purchase.

Read up them here:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

[Tony Sade]

Kernel Panics are not generally serious....and not ussually related to the MB or HD. How full IS your HD? Have you added ram recently? Luckily you are under warantee....and it might be a good time to purchase "applecare"...you can do that up to a year from initial purchase.

Read up them here:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

Thanks for the info, Tim. Apple originally thought the KP wasn't a big deal either, but after a lot of time going up the food chain to a "product specialist" and then engineering, I was told that it clearly was a hardware problem. (LB, HD, or something else that I can't remember).

My hard drive is no where near full, but I did recently add a Crucial memory thingie (highly technical term, I know but my CRS keeps getting worse.) The KP reoccured when the new memory was removed. Oddly, it only occurs when the machine is idle. I can avoid it by tuning in an iTunes radio channel and leaving it on, but obviously, I want to have the problem fixed.

I did get the AppleCare plan, so I'm good. Apple offered to send the tech to my house, but there's an authorized repair shop a few minutes away that I trust, so I'll be taking it there, when I can do it on my own schedule, and not have to hang around the house all day waiting for someone to show up. (Probably the guy I'll be taking it to.)

I haven't read the information on the link you provided, but I will before I take the iMac in for repair, just in case it recommends something that hasn't been tried yet.

FWIW to anyone considering the Mini stack-I found the instructions for the software rather maddening, at least on my first brief run through. I just copied my important files to the drive without doing an actual backup. I'll get back to the software when the situation is stable and set up a backup routine, assuming I can figure out how to do that. (I'm usually pretty good at reading and understanding manuals for lots of different things, but even their quick start guide is a puzzle.)

Cheers,

[Art Mulder]

FWIW to anyone considering the Mini stack-I found the instructions for the software rather maddening, at least on my first brief run through. I just copied my important files to the drive without doing an actual backup. I'll get back to the software when the situation is stable and set up a backup routine, assuming I can figure out how to do that. (I'm usually pretty good at reading and understanding manuals for lots of different things, but even their quick start guide is a puzzle.)

Tony - look for "deja vu mac", which is a shareware piece of software, lets you backup to external disks. Works great. You can backup manually or prescheduled. You can backup to local disks or to remote network-mounted disks. I use it to backup my wife's iMac to my Linux system (which shares out a folder using Samba)

Or, you could get Carbon Copy Cloner - that'll do even more in terms of mirroring a disk. It'll even make the external disks bootable if you want.

best,
...art

[Tony Sade]

Tony - look for "deja vu mac", which is a shareware piece of software, lets you backup to external disks. Works great. You can backup manually or prescheduled. You can backup to local disks or to remote network-mounted disks. I use it to backup my wife's iMac to my Linux system (which shares out a folder using Samba)

Or, you could get Carbon Copy Cloner - that'll do even more in terms of mirroring a disk. It'll even make the external disks bootable if you want.

best,
...art

Thanks for the links, Art, but unless I'm missing something, neither of these programs looks quite ready for an Intel iMac. Have you used one on an Intel machine?

Cheers,

[Tim Morton]

Thanks for the links, Art, but unless I'm missing something, neither of these programs looks quite ready for an Intel iMac. Have you used one on an Intel machine?

Cheers,

Not sure if this is what you are looking for...but I use it for backing up at work now that Backup toolkit is no longer being made.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

RE Kernal Panics....have you done a "repair permision" since removing the ram?

[Art Mulder]

Thanks for the links, Art, but unless I'm missing something, neither of these programs looks quite ready for an Intel iMac. Have you used one on an Intel machine?

Not yet. But I've had DejaVu for over a year on our mini, and it has been used by others at work as well the past 2 years.

I hadn't noticed that they didn't have intel binaries yet. They're both small shops, maybe even one-man-shows, which might explane the slow pace -- difficult to buy all those machines.