echoes600

hi guys, i'm planning to buy a macbook on august or september. i currently own a dell laptop, so i need to put my stuff from the dell to my mac. because of that i need an external hard drive around 500gbs which works fine with both macs and pcs. i also want it to be safe--my laptop's hard drive died a couple of months ago and it was one of the most annoying things i had ever experienced since i lost all my data. what brand and what model do you suggest for an external hard drive? thanks!

olgita

I own a Maxtor...which doesn't work all that well with Vista (copied files are damaged), so if you don't have XP to transfer your files, I'd recommend getting something else.

lville

I own a Western Digital Passport. It works very well and came with software that lets you sync. Although i'm not positive the software would work on a mac. But, I'm positive the actual hard drive would and you can probably find mac freeware to sync with the HD. The Passport is the more portable and smaller capacity type. The western digital My Book has larger capacities and is bigger in size. Although the Passport may be up to around 320 GB if you want a more portable HD. Either way, I highly recommend Western Digital.

BCEagle91

I like Western Digital drives but I've heard that the My Books feel flimsy.

If you're looking for performance and high-capacity, then 2.5 inch external notebook drives probably aren't the way to go. Many use passive cooling and run at 5400 RPM and you generally get larger caches on desktop drives.

I don't remember what the situation with MacBooks are on Firewire but if MacBooks come with Firewire 800, then that would be the fastest way to hookup the external drive. The downside is that Firewire 800 enclosures can be rather pricey.

lilblewskydragon

I have a 500GB Iomega, it connects by usb and it's super easy to use.
Remember to use the FAT32 format because NTFS only works for Windows and is Read only for MACs.

BCEagle91

It would have been nice if the implementation of wireless USB were out by now.