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I have 2 of their Mercury Elite Pro enclosures for IDE (USB/FireWire 400) and recently purchased one of their Mercury Elite Pro enclosures for SATA (USB/FireWire 400). You can't go wrong with a purchase from OWC. They definitely know Mac hardware. OWC Mercury Elite Pro FireWire 400 + USB 2.0 Oxford 934SSA Enclosure Kit - for 3.5" SATA Hard Drives You can purchase a complete external drive from them, or build your own from an internal SATA driver from NewEgg.com with OWC's Mercury Elite Pro external enclosure. WD Green WD15EADS 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA internal drive |
I have good results with both the Buffalo DriveStation Combo 1TB and LaCie 301442U d2 Quadra 1TB.
Both drives are run off Firewire 800 ports on an iMac and a Mac Mini. In addition to the SuperDuper backups, we also use these externals to handle Time Machine backups for our 5 machines, both local and over our LAN. |
The Linux Net attached storage.
Dlink DNS-323 works file with SuperDuper |
Iomega eGo compatibility
I haven't seen them mentioned much, but I've had success with a FireWire/USB Iomega eGo. I don't remember if it came set up for Mac, because I reformat when I partition anyway. I think it was set up for Apple, but their USB only version is set up to work with Windows. The newest FireWire eGo models are named "Mac Edition." I have the earlier 320GB model, which is still widely available for purchase at this time.
The drive comes with Retrospect Lite, a horrible software that seems like a relic from the tape disk era. I tried it because it was free with the drive, but free is too much in my opinion. SuperDuper! on the other hand, is very easy to use. I think it's great that it can be used for free to get a good, working backup. What a wonderful service for the Mac community. I bought the license to get all the features. The price is reasonable, and the smart backup saves a lot of time, especially if you have more than one Mac as I do. I made seven partitions on the drive, one each for four of my six PPC Macs, one partition for a clone of the Tiger installation DVD for my CD-RW iMac that can't read DVDs, one partition for TechTool, and a large partition for throwing data off my computers to free up space on the internal drives. It's amazing how well an old Mac runs Tiger if the OS has enough room to do its thing. Many times I've exceeded a thousand open tabs in Safari with no slow-down (unless I try to close a large number at once) on an iBook 466MHz SE running with the maximum 576MB of RAM, if I stay under 10GB full of the 20GB drive. But mysteriously, other days two tabs is too many.:p I've test-booted each of the back-up partitions on the eGo, and each of them works perfectly. SuperDuper! is almost too easy to use. I love it. I've been a user of TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior and even Anubis for a decade now. I'm glad to finally have a utility that requires no effort on my part. I start up a Mac using Safe Boot, connect the eGo, open SuperDuper! (which remembers which partition the particular Mac is backed up to) and it already knows I want to do a smart backup. One click later it's off and running. It's not very fast- varying between 12-45 Mbps. Seems to take 45 minutes to back up unless I did it a few days earlier. Then it takes 25-30 minutes or so with a 60GB drive at 20GB full. The computer hardware is older, it might be faster on a new system. It is faster than Retrospect Lite by far. I'm very happy with both the eGo and SuperDuper!, my only druther is that Iomega doesn't make the desktop version of the eGo with FireWire- it's USB only. I'd snap one up in a heartbeat if it had FireWire, I like the look of the product a lot. (I bought the eGo largely because of its nice shape and pretty ruby color. Probably not a factor for 95% of the people who will read this.) The eGo comes with a nice warranty, and it's very quiet. It has no fan, so it does get HOT quickly. I don't leave it plugged in. I consider the lack of a fan to be a plus, as the noise bothers me. Only my fastest computer, a 17" iMac G4 has a fan- and that's one reason it's rarely used. I keep a few silent, portable fans around my computers to facilitate the heat removal, which I recommend for anyone running a fan-less PPC. I point a fan on the eGo sometimes, but really, it's not made for lengthy periods of use. If you are in the market for a drive to leave attached all the time, I would not recommend the eGo. Otherwise, it's just fine. |
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Seagate lists it as Firewire/IEEE 1394 compatible and that specification lists booting capability. What a bunch of idiots!:mad: |
Seagate FreeAgent Desk works
My Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB is able to boot my G5 after I repartitioned the drive as APM. I wish I had known about the partitioning stuff in advance because the FreeAgent package said "Formatted for Mac!" but what that really meant was that it was GUID so my first attempt to create a bootable drive merely created a readable drive, not a bootable drive. Oops. Works now, though.
By the way, how does one tell what kind of chipset is used? It's not on the product box and I went to the manufacturer's website and can't find it there either. I suspect it's not the chipset but rather some part of the Firewire protocol that simply isn't implemented on these other chipsets. (I took a look at the Firewire docs and they're filled with versions and options, sigh. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.) I spoke to an Apple engineer and asked if Apple could formally describe their requirements for a bootable drive and his response was "Apple doesn't support firewire boot. If it works for you, that's great but it's not supported." So that's their way of getting out of having to explain their requirements. Sigh. |
Kind of a silly response from Apple, but what can you do. :)
Anyway, it's hard to tell what chipset a drive uses if they don't advertise it, alas. But I'm glad your drive works for you. |
WD My Passport Studio does not work
I have a 500G WD My Passport Studio that will not boot a 17" (non-unibody) MBP over FW800 but will over USB.
The bootable volume on the WD is selectable in Prefs > Startup Disk but the computer will not boot from it if it's connected by FW800 (reverts to booting from the internal disk after a 30-sec delay). Starting up with the option key also only shows the internal disk when the external is connected with FW800. It'll boot over USB but i t ' s s o s l o w . . . |
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Sorry, but it's not surprising that WD externals are having problems with your Mac...
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That means that the drive is either failing internally and not responding, so the bridge drops, or that you've got other FW issues. Contact LaCie.
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I've had trouble with Western Digital external drives myself. It looks like Seagate as of now is only doing USB 2 and USB 3 drives, though (looking for one to backup my wife's iMac yesterday). Even eSATA seems to be fading.
My experience with USB has been pretty slow. Are there any good current recommendations other than WD? |
Didn't I recommend a bunch at the top of thiis thread and n the User's Guide?
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Drobo=no, another enclosure?
David,
I've read highly critical reviews of Drobo. I *wanted* to hear good things, since I have about five large but different high-speed HDs. Have you seen NewEgg and Amazon reviews-- they are really awful, and Apple has pulled the product. Like many people, I want to put all these drives to work and not spend too much, but many enclosures seem to be $500, and they require matching drives. I also don't want wind-tunnel loud fans running in my living room. I'm a huge silentPC guy. Oh- I'm somewhat happy with a stop-gap solution: the inexpensive BlacX dock by Thermaltake. It has an eSata connector (speed) and USB (for booting, if necessary). This way I can use some of the large drives for redundancy by having three. Any more recent suggestions? Thanks, iamgreen Quote:
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I've got three Drobos here I test with frequently: a Drobo Pro, a regular Drobo and a Drobo S. I like all three (though I think the Drobo software - that is, the Dashboard - is pretty awful on the Mac).
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