external hard drive recommendations . . .

[etch]

actually one other thought,

may sound stupid but, im presuming the WD passport drives are intentionally coded to spin down, but do you think theres any possbility that they would become more unstable if kept spinning than a drive that did acknowledge energy saver settings? or is this something thats been coded purely to attempt to prolong the life of their products?

and DvlsAdvct this is true, but wouldn't the enclosure need an external power supply?

[Karlos Santos]

Ive never had an issue with my LaCie Rugged external HD. Works a charm and bounces when you drop it :-)

I thought i was right about that WD spin down thing. Thanks Zac for confirming that.

[DvlsAdvct]

You can get them with laptop drives that are USB powered (or FW powered, I guess)

but for standard drives, yes, it will. The price you pay for the convenience, though

[etch]

ok kl, yeah ideally i want to avoid having an extra power lead if possible,

any recommendations on a laptop drive? just to get an idea of comparative prices, was looking for something around 300GB

[Kyur]

if you've got the money i suggest G Raid drives, i use one Mini for my music and another for my video. They are small, solid, and can take some beating. Plus the option of firewire 800 allows for insanely fast data transfers that i've yet to find on a better HD for macbook/pro. my harddrive has never let me down.

the price is a little high but well worth the money.

[Zac Kyoti]

or is this something thats been coded purely to attempt to prolong the life of their products?

Supposedly they do this to prolong drive life, though there's some debate as to whether or not the drive always spinning up and down is more abuse than spinning constantly. I don't know, I just use the external for backup, so I'm not too worried about it. As for stability; the spin-down feature is actually in the drive's firmware, and by using the applet, you aren't actually messing with that, you are just physically accessing a file on the drive before the 10 minute mark, to keep things spinning. I haven't heard that the firmware code makes WD drives unstable with regards to mac energy saver settings.

[R3clu23]

I got a Seagate 500gig external slim drive, and it works great.

My old WD w/ enclosure was too loud when I turned it on. It sounded like it was going to fly off my table.

[BentoSan]

Seagate hard drives ftw

[r0bust]

what do you guys mean by spin down/up?!?!

[miyuru]

what do you guys mean by spin down/up?!?!

I don't know the exact specifics, but in layman's terms you can think of your HD as a spinning platter. To access info on it, the platter physically spins like a CD. Spin up refers to when the platter begins spinning from not spinning. Spin down refers to when it stops spinning after spinning.

The whole issue with WD HDs is that they are programmed to spin down (stop spinning) if no data has been accessed in about 10 minutes. This is thought to promote the life of the HD as spinning down results in less wear and tear on the HD. The downside is, the next time you want to access data on the HD, it will have to spin up again. Instead, it would be ideal for the HD to always be spinning.