hard (drive) decision

[mixed_up_media]

I need to buy an external hard drive, but I find myself unable to decide on one.

Part of my indecision perhaps comes from wanting it to do too much.  My main purpose in buying it is to provide more storage space for my laptop, which unfortunately has a rather small hard drive.  I would ideally like something portable that can draw its power from the

Comments

[lietya]

We have an external 250-gig hard drive that's Western Digital, and I love it. More to the point, we paid about $120 for it, and that was two years ago. I think it *must* be possible to find a better example on the current market! Ours is not necessarily technically "portable," I guess, but I'll at least weigh in that it's the MyBook (there's a 500-gig version of it at Best Buy for $119, looks like) and at least for ME it's been perfectly sturdy and functional

[doctorhook]

I guess it's partly my fault.... it came formatted ntfs. So I should have immediately reformatted it fat32. But I didn't, and now I've got a lot of files on it, which, as you say, I'd have to find somewhere to put.

If I had MacOS 10.4 installed, then apparently there's a solution. But one of the reasons I wanted to back up my Mac was to install Mac 10.4. (I guess that's Catch-10.4. :) )

[llnaughty]

what version of os x would you be upgrading from?

of course you could just upgrade without backing up, but i understand (and would recommend) wanting to back it up first.

yes, in 10.4 you could install macfuse and ntfs3-g to get read/write capabilities with ntfs drives.

[llnaughty]

(mixed_up_media sorry for going on a tangent on your post...)

doctorhook, let me know at any time if this is too much info, or if you you don't want the suggestions, or (depending on your computing skills) don't feel comfortable implementing any of my ideas. figuring out this kind of stuff is actually fun for me. :-)

how much of the 500 GB do you have left on your seagate? how much do you need to back up your mac?

there's a free livecd (bootable) that you can download and burn with a tool called gparted that can resize (shrink in your case) an existing partition without needing to delete the contents and create newer partitions in available space after the resize

[mixed_up_media]

(mixed_up_media sorry for going on a tangent on your post...)

I thought tangents were what LJ was all about? ;)

Anyway, no problem. I'm always happy to host a good discussion, even if it's not exactly the same one I started.

[lietya]

Oooh, that's a very nice perk from a job. I didn't realize "a gift" meant from work, but seeing as I think even the little dictionary flash drives we got were darned cool, consider me very impressed by that one. :) It sounds like it's about fair compensation for wrangling 450 freshman, actually...

That does sound rather frustrating.

[mixed_up_media]

When sidebernie first brought me my dictionary flash drive, I said, "oh, cool."

Unfortunately, neither the dictionary itself nor the storage capacity on the drive was large enough to suit me. (I already have a 2GB flash drive, because I need one that large for my image files. And I don't use anything smaller than a certain desktop dictionary, ever.)

But I'm aware that I'm being unusually picky, and that it is in fact a neat product concept.

[lietya]

I admit, my reaction was actually somewhat similar. It's a neat toy, but I don't need the dictionary it carries at home (already installed) and I certainly don't need it at work! And I have a 1-gig personal flash drive which is plenty for me.

On the bright side, I think I'm going to keep that dictionary one at work as a "dedicated" spare drive to store a copy of my browser* and critical [small] backup files so that when this work computer dies as it so regularly does, I can work off of one of the spares more easily. Seems fitting, somehow.

*I hate IE with the passion of a thousand suns, and I don't, it turns out, have download capabilities on DMC's left-behind machine because it's still keyed to her, so I can't put Mozilla on it.

[mixed_up_media]

You mean T.A. didn't replace DMC's user info with yours when he set you up on that machine? Well, that's just bad form!

[lietya]

Well, he didn't exactly set me up with her machine. :) I just kinda borrowed it whenever my own computer was in the shop... I'm sure he would, if I asked, but at those moments I'd've been taking him away from fixing *mine,* so I didn't ask!

[mixed_up_media]

Oh, I see! Well, good--I'm relieved to know that he didn't leave you hanging. :)