casual user scratching below!

G

GUNDAM-RX78

Registered
Hi guys

I have been a casual user of mac for three years now and I have just started to fill up my mac with music, I have 40 gigs on my HD and I would like to back that up with a external hard drive.

I will buy a large(ish) external drive of around 200gigs or a little less I dont know at this time, but my Mac is hamperd by all this memory usage from　my music.

I am not to boned up on hard drives and would like to know more.

1)Are they reliable
2)Easy and user friendly eg:plug in and drag drop
3)Can I use the hard drive while it is hooked up to my mac, can I play my music while it is on the external drive through itunes while having no music on th einternal drive?

Cheers guys.
 
Whatever you do, stay away from the LaCie Porsche-branded drives.

Other than those, FireWire drives are as reliable as the drives that are inside of them. I hear that LaCie's d2 drives are good, and if you get a generic FireWire case and slap a good-quality Western Digital drive inside, that'd be reliable as well.

Just wanted to steer you away from the Porsche drives. While some users may experience no problems at all with them, there's too many bad reports out there making me want to tell people, "No to Porsche!"

And yep, they're easy to set up and use -- just like any other hard drive. Plug it in, turn it on, drag and drop. You can even keep your music permanently on the external drive and play it with iTunes -- simply set the preferences of iTunes' music folder to the external drive, and iTunes should take care of the rest!
 
It really is as easy as CaCa was describing. this is exactly what i have done. I have two 200 gig drives with my music on it. the iTunes prefs are just set to look to that drive(s) (software RAIDed so it looks like one drive) for the music instead of my home folder.
 
Jeffo said:
It really is as easy as CaCa was describing. this is exactly what i have done. I have two 200 gig drives with my music on it. the iTunes prefs are just set to look to that drive(s) (software RAIDed so it looks like one drive) for the music instead of my home folder.
Click to expand...

What does raided mean?
 
Yep -- in short, a RAID allows you to use multiple similarly-sized hard drives as one logical drive, with options to optimize for speed ("striping" the set, where data is written in chunks to different drives in the RAID increasing access time), or redundancy (using one or more of the drives as a "backup" to the others via parity, so if one drive fails, the others can "clean up" and preserve the data), or a combination of those.

Mainly used for servers, but RAID has desktop applications as well, like video editing and what-not. It's cool to mess with, but, for example, instead of two 100GB drives in a RAID set, most casual home users would be better off just using a single 200GB drive.
 
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