Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Buying a new external drive

I'm considering buying a second external hard drive to back up my current ten year-old imac.

Some considerations. I might get a new computer in the near future, very likely not a Mac. My current iMac has USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire 400 port. The internal drive is 180 GB and half of it is used.

My current external backup is a 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue connected via the Firewire port on the Mac. The WD also has a USB port.

Lots to consider these days. Money first. $120 or less if possible. I'm convinced backing up via Firewire 400 is faster than USB 2.0. But Firewire 800 and USB 3.0 are backwards compatible, so having to buy a drive with those connections doesn't seem to be a problem. I would need an adapter to connect Firewire 800 to Firewire 400. I have no need for an external SSD.

My usual outlets for buying are B&H and OWC. Amazon, ebay – meh. Maybe.

Might be a good time to future-proof this decision, to put it in today's vernacular, and buy something I can use down the road. My current 250 GB might not work as a future backup, but that depends on what I'm going to back up in the future.

New Egg has a G-Technology drive for $88. 500GB, Firewire 800 and USB 3.0

firewire tends to be the best choice for external storage for older macs

Firewire is dead insofar as Apple is concerned. If you buy a new Mac (not to mention a PC), you won't have a FW connection. USB will probably serve you for the foreseeable future. Your current iMac's USB 2 connection will be very slow (I know because I hooked that setup to a friend's old MBP, although she recently upgraded to a brand-new MBP and is much happier).

If you have the inclination, you could buy the drive and the enclosure separately. That gives you the ability to choose a particular brand of drive instead of living with the one that is pre-installed. You will likely get a better warranty that way also. Although you may not be looking at SSD now, give it another thought. I have external drives of both types (conventional and SSD) and there is a HUGE difference in performance.

don't forget, BOTH firewire and usb1/2 are requiring dongles on the new laptops. I'd be willing to bet Apple chucks USB-A connectors altogether in the not-so-distant future. USB2's days are numbered on macs.

You can't boot from a USB drive in 10.6

If memory serves, the OS doesn't determine if you can boot from USB. That's a function of the motherboard. I believe that Intel Macs CAN boot from USB but PPC Macs can't.

Jon is correct, and if you don't mind spartan, you may be able to get more bang for your buck if instead of an enclosure you buy a simple USB 3/SATA connector cable to go with your new HD/SSD.

It's actually a function of the firmware. I actually got a powermac g5 to boot over usb believe it or not! Requires interacting with the openfirmware boot screen to "hold its hand" since there's no way to set the startup path correctly in an OF variable.

And yes 10.6 boots fine over usb. 10.4 will boot happily over usb too, with 10.4.7 on the original intel MacBooks for example.

the only problem with the g5 is that ALL the powerpc that would do that were usb2, so it was god-awful slow. think like 10-15 min to boot.

Coincidentally, I do have one of those cables. I have a box o' cables I've acquired over the years. Ridiculous!

I'm also looking at external optical drives at OWC. Would an external optical drive connected to USB 2 work slower (booting from a system disk, burning CDs, installing software) than the internal CD drive I have now? Terribly slower?

I'm sure that USB 2 is slower than Firewire 400, but OWC sells their optical drives with USB, not Firewire.

https://eshop.macsales.com/Search/?&filter.catidpath=2224/2225/2226

USB 2 is painfully slow. I tried to boot a friend's old MBP from a Disk Warrior USB 3 flash drive via her USB 2 connection. After 20 minutes, I gave up. In addition, she had been using an OWC external USB 3 dock connected to her computer via her USB 2 port for a Time Machine backup. The initial backup took 4 hours or more.

I had used that same dock on my computer with a USB 3 port and it was quite fast, even with a spinning rust drive.

USB 2's raw data flow rate is theoretically ~20% faster than Firewire 400 (480 Mbp/s vs 393 Mbp/s) but because of USB's high overhead, Firewire 400 ends up with a true data rate of 49.13 MB/s compared to USB 2's 35 MB/s or over 40% higher data transfer rate. (see this Wikipedia article.

Either Firewire 400 or USB 2 is easily fast enough to support an optical drive but using either for an external SSD or even a SATA spinning rust drive is like pouring 50 gallons of water through a drinking straw. Even the old IDE/pATA is capable of 133.3 MB/s. So since you are limited to USB 2 or Firewire 400 just about any USB 1, 2, or 3 optical drive will do. (I recently upgraded my wife to this Apple Superdrive and both of us have been very happy with both the quality and performance over other third party optical drives we have used and seen.) If you are wanting more capacity combine this enclosure with this drive and you will have all speed you can use and 3TB capacity for a very reasonable price and about 5 minutes of your time to install the drive in the enclosure.

That is interesting considering how many people on that page disliked that drive.

That was my thought when I was looking.

I wound up with an OWC that suits my purposes, although I can't say that I've made any comparisons.

Note: Unless Apple has changed their drive, its cable is not detachable, nor is it very long, so you're kinda restricted in that sense.

I presume you are referring to the Apple Superdrive. All I can say is I find the enclosure to be very sturdy and although I am not a fan of slot loading drives it has proven a lot more reliable than the two tray loading optical drives that preceded it and IIRC were about equal in cost.

Yes the permanently attached USB cable is about a foot in length, but I prefer that to finding some way to hide or shorten the common 3 foot connecting cable.

We discussed optical drives about 9 months ago, and as I recall, your wife had an OWC slot-loader similar to the one I ended up buying; how does the Apple drive compare to that one?

(I am appalled by the "cable jungles" I see under some people's desks. I've got all my cables coiled and secured with zip ties, which I nominate as one of the world's great inventions.)

I think your iMac's HD is user serviceable, and if so, you ought to consider replacing it with an SSD and using it either in an enclosure or with a cable as your new backup drive.

Since your RAM appears to be maxed out, it would be money VERY wisely spent...the only way to speed up your iMac.

It's serviceable by an expert, not by me.

This is one of the more difficult machines to upgrade. I've already watched YouTube videos on how to do it. No thanks. Not worth the risk.

I've found OWC prices on drives to be high; the same drive can be purchased for less on Amazon, which is where I buy my external drives.

USB is the way to go. USB 3 drives will work with your USB 2 Mac, though of course they'll be slow. But they'll also work on any future Mac you can get, and they're cheap, cheap, cheap. $120 is more than enough; I got a 2 TB external USB 3 drive for $49. Nowadays, $90 will get you 3 TB, $110 will get you 4 TB, $120 will get you 5 TB. (Did I mention that USB 3 drives are cheap?)

I'm not a big fan of Amazon.

I've had to return too many items from them because they arrive broken or faulty in some way. I distrust some of those odd brands and sellers.

I dislike returning items anywhere, which I've had to do more in recent years with the quality of everything in decline.

I've been buying from B&H and OfficeDepot. Both have been reliable. You can find good deals through them, too, and at OWC.

I ordered an LG optical drive from B&H. I wanted a tray loading drive, not slot loading, because they're more reliable when ripping music CDs. M-disc compatible. We'll see.

The internal optical drive on my imac has always bothered me because it's so loud. I don't mean just the fans. There's a rrrrrrrr that revs up and is quite loud and troubling, like it's about about to take off from my desk. I read somewhere that this noise is caused by the lettering, design, labeling on the CD. I don't know if that's true. It happens on many different kinds of discs, regardless of design, but not every disc.

I agree there's not much point in hooking up an SSD to a USB 2 jack. I put a Crucial SSD in an old Dell laptop running XP and the improvement is impressive. I would never go back. Everything is faster, and I hate waiting for computers. Running XP on that eight-year-old laptop is much faster than Windows 8.1 on my Mom's two-year-old desktop Dell with an Intel i5 3GHz. That machine, by contrast, is frustratingly slow. Running the same maintenance program on my laptop versus the desktop is night and day, which is absurd considering the age of the laptop.

I don't know why that desktop is so low. A 3GHz i5? I maxed out the memory at 16GB of RAM. 16GB! The internal drive is a Toshiba 7200 rpm, which should not be slow. I assume that the slowdown is not from the drive but from the crappy operating system. I sit and wait, watching that circle cursor, when it appears at all, wondering what the computer is doing. This is one of the worst aspects of Windows.

When I sit down to work, I want to work that second. I dislike waiting at all and I dislike being interrupted. And I dislike not knowing WHY I'm waiting. No feedback, no progress bar — not that Windows progress bars are ever accuarate. Mom asks me what it's doing. I don't know either, Mom. Waiting on the computer is much worse in Windows than with the MacOS. Or at least it was. I'm still on snappy 10.6. I visited an Apple store a few months ago. The new Macs are slower than my current Mac. Store models! I sat there waiting for the Finder. I rarely have to do that now. Why would I buy a new Mac?

Computers are supposed to help us save time, not devour more of it. It's only gotten worse over the years. The processors are faster, and the drives, and so on, but as you can see I still end up waiting, troubleshooting, or in some other way wasting time.

And the compatibility problems. Put in an external SSD? Well, no, not with my sealed-up proprietary Mac. External SSD? No, not with my current jacks of USB 2 and FireWire 400. Firewire 800 is becoming a thing of the past. Booting from an optical drive? Slow. I just bought a USB hub. Nope, it's recommended I plug my DAC into the Mac, not the hub. You want to bet on whether my new optical drive will work better with the hub or plugged directly into the Mac? Then what's the point of having a hub!

Technological progress? It's amazing what people will choose to tolerate.

You have chosen to tolerate a computer that is over a decade old and you are experiencing what I call "motorcycle syndrome": when I owned and rode a motorcycle I found that I spent about half my time riding the motorcycle to get parts, supplies, etc. for the motorcycle. I had to decide, as you seem to have done with your computer, if it was worth it.

We all make choices.

They only help save time when you keep what you use up to date. Technology will universally "get worse over the years" if left to stagnate while the rest of the world passes you by. It's not getting worse, it's staying the same while the world moves on, continuously widening the gap between the technology and the era it's being used in.