External HD

J

JulesBravo

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 28, 2003
Messages
68
Hey I was just wondering what type of external HD you guys would recommend for a Powerbook g4. I want one that I can use on both my Windows PC and my Powerbook. It's just going to be mostly movies and music.
 
What I would recommend is buying a standard internal harddrive and getting an external enclosure to keep it in. This gives you a little more flexibilty with size and such.
 
Smartdisk is also a good company with a solid warranty (1 year). Little known fact about the LaCies is they're only a 90 day warranty!
The LaCies are good drives, just the warranty is a little short.

Any firewire drive (and usb2 if you have it on your system, only issue is firewire is much better for transfering video at a continuous speed) will work with PCs and Macs depending on the format you decide to use with the drive.
Fat32: will work on both with no changes, it's a little slower to write to from the mac though, so don't use it for video editing.
HFS+: Will only work on the mac, unless you have Macdrive on the pc, then it will work on both.
NTFS: Will read on 10.3 on the mac, however to write to the drive I believe you have to have 10.3.5. (the upgrade improved NTFS support.. not positive write access is available for the drives). Obviously will work on the PC.

Your other option is to partition the drive in two, have part for the mac and part for the PC.
 
No, no video editing. I'm basically just going to use it to store odds and ends. Anything I download period is basically going to go on there. So if I have a friend who wants something off there I can just take over the HD. Their too computer incompetent to figure out bittorrent or irc.
 
In that case, I'd suggest the portable Smartdisk drives. I've got a 40gig I've had for close to two years.. and I carry the thing everywhere! I also have a desktop 120gig drive that I never move because it's such a pain. Sure it holds more, is cheaper, and a little faster, I prefer the portability quite a bit.
 
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