Best External Hardrive

I have a Mac Mini (1 year old) and a Dell Dimension 3000(2 years old). The hard drives are getting pretty full on them and I was thinking of getting an external hard drive I could use to backup my machines, use for extra storage and perhaps install a seperate OS. I know nothing about hard drives and was wondering if their are any recommendations on what to get. The size of the macs hard drive is 70GB and the PC's is 80GB so I'm guessing something with 150GB would be the minimum.

Anyway thanks !!

 

Hard drive prices have dropped like rocks in the past year or so. Example: you can get a 500GB USB2.0 External drive for under $140 http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=203400931&adid=17662

If I were to buy/make an external drive, I would look for on with eSATA support. Fastest transfer rates out there, and almost always has USB2.0 support also. Requires SATA drive.

Unless you find an amazing deal (or the manufacturer has a guarantee against data loss if the drive goes bad, which is very rare), I would recommend buying a nice SATAII drive like this one and get a nice eSATA enclosure. Pop the drive inside, format, and you're good. Here is an example of an external eSATA enclosure with USB2.0 support.

Even if you cant utilize the eSATA feature right away, you can use the USB2.0.

 

I like the selection @ www.cooldrives.com check em out.

 

Thanks for the info.
Just one more question. I didn't know this before but I saw something about a network hardrive that hooks up to your router and can be used by both at the same time. I was wondering how good they are and if anyone knows of a good one that is mac and pc compatible. I might prefer a hard drive like this cause I could use it for both computers instead of having to unplug it and move it everytime I wanted to back something up. Something with 250gb or more would be good. I'll keep looking.

Anyway thanks again

 

what you're looking for is called NAS (Network Attatched Storage), or a file server. It is the more expensive choice, because it has to be a standalone network device that is able to use TCP/IP protocol. To achieve NAS, there are a few things you can do:

-Buy a retail NAS at a high premium.
-find a NAS case and put a hard drive in it, probably the cheaper way to go.
-buy/use an old computer as a NAS unit (requires an Operating system, however they make a couple linux distros that are made specifically for NAS, like NASLite that will simply turn an older computer into a file server. http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php)