What Hard Drive to use

[rayc325]

Hi All.

I just found this forum while searching for a backup solution for my powerbook G4. I was wondering what would be a good hard drive to use to make an external bootable drive using SD!. I would like to use the bus powered drive if those work. Anyone use 'em? Thanks

[dnanian]

Hi, Ray. We generally suggest LaCie, OWC and WiebeTech FireWire drives: many are bus powered, and all three companies make good products. (OWC and WiebeTech are long-time Mac supporters, too.)

[strayduck]

I would also like to submit for consideration the EZQuest Cobra HDs. While the fans *can* be a little noisy the cases are plenty cool and they are very easy to disassemble to swap drives (in case of emergency or upgrade to larger HD on the cheap). Not for everyone, but since I like to (and have found many occasion to) take things apart I find them quite useful.

Cheers.

[dnanian]

Do they use the Oxford chipset, strayduck, and do they consistently support Mac boot?

[jar.en]

I have a 250gig seagate and they work well too.
According to them, they use the oxford chip.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...rnal_chip.html

(at least that's what i gathered from my limited knowledge!)

[sdsl]

The person who originally posted indicated a desire for a bus powered external hard disk. At work, my company provided me with this one, the "firelite,"

http://www.smartdisk.com/eWeb/smartd...iteporthdd.asp

... it is 3 years old now and still working fine. The one they gave me has 80 Gig, and I've used in exclusively to make clones/backups. It is a firewire bus powered disk, so there's nothing to plug in except the firewire cable to your macintosh.

[An aside -- I think this "firelite" disk comes with a simple version of "bounce back" which is probably something of a competitor to SuperDuper. I must say that I was never tempted to try something different from SuperDuper because SuperDuper works so well. And I don't even use half of the capabilities of SuperDuper, all I do is manually perform clones and then manually do Smart Update once per day. However the "firelite" disk itself works quite well for cloning purposes.]

[greenjeens]

Originally Posted by sdsl

[An aside -- I think this "firelite" disk comes with a simple version of "bounce back" which is probably something of a competitor to SuperDuper. I must say that I was never tempted to try something different from SuperDuper because SuperDuper works so well. And I don't even use half of the capabilities of SuperDuper, all I do is manually perform clones and then manually do Smart Update once per day. However the "firelite" disk itself works quite well for cloning purposes.]

In order to get a version of Bounce Back that will create a bootable drive is going to require purchasing a more expensive full version. Much more expensive than Super Duper!

I tried it and things got very confusing quickly. Trashed it. IIRC, there were cool things that looked slick and were not neccessary to creating a simple easy to use back u and bootable clone.
I also tried Retrospect and could never get it working right.
I read some revues of Dantz retrospect, by skilled users and apparently they pointed out problems from the various versions and a making a bootable copy.

It seems very important to have the same complete bootable version that was used when backing up, too be able to work in an emergency. Retrospect reviews gave me the impression that there were some flaws, where it might not work as a bootable clone when really needed. Check out the revues first.

And of course, support is what it's all about. SD support is not only good, it's fun! And I think my bald patch is showing hair regrowth too, possibly from using super duper

[dnanian]

Jeez, if your bald patch is showing regrowth, it's coming at the expense of mine...