external hard drive

[airforce]

Hi - thinking about getting an external hard drive to do my back ups and to store photos, music etc...

I have a iMacG5 Power PC with 2.1 GHz.

What type/kind of HD would be suitable ?  Could a smaller (?) portable HD do the trick as well ?

Thanks

Airforce.

[Dan Millar]

Well, my first choice are the small 2.5-inch HD-based firewire drives. They do not require external power, are fast on any Mac that has firewire, and can be made boot-able, but only come in up to 320 GB (only!). Second choice are the same sized USB drives. Downside - they require external power, are slow on Macs that do not have USB 2.0, and cannot be made bootable. Upside - much easier to find and very cheap.

Third choice for me are the 3.5-inch based drives. Thay come in larger sizes, at lower prices than the 2.5 inch drives - up to 1 TB now, but they definitely require external power and the external cases are a tad more expensive - but much more available.

You can pick up a case and a drive and assemble them yourself - if you can mate a 40-pin connector and have a small phillips screwdriver, you're good to go. You can also buy one assembled and warrantied from LaCie, Seagate, and others.

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

Hi - thinking about getting an external hard drive to do my back ups and to store photos, music etc...
I have a iMacG5 Power PC with 2.1 GHz.
What type/kind of HD would be suitable ?  Could a smaller (?) portable HD do the trick as well ?

As Dan points out, if you want convenience, a 2.5" firewire drive is the way to go. The firewire connection from your computer transfers data, and also powers the drive, so only a single cable is needed. Sweet!

If you want lower cost/larger capacity, then an external 3.5" drive is the way to go. It will come with a 'wall wart' that you'll need to use to power the drive, even should you choose to connect to it using firewire.

According to http://support.apple.com/specs/imac/iMac_G5.html, your computer does have USB 2.0 ports, so you can use the very common, commodity 3.5" external drives that support only USB connections. (I sure wouldn't want to use a USB drive on an older computer that had only USB 1.x ports, but that's not the case for your computer.) However my preference would be to look a bit harder/pay a bit extra and go for a 3.5" drive with USB and firewire connections, and then use firewire to connect to the drive.

...b