<p>What would you recommend for an external hard drive to use for backup for macs? Price is the biggest factor</p>
<p>How much space do you need?</p>
<p>Western Digital does a My Passport for Mac.
The 500 GB one is about 150 dollars, and the 320 GB one is about 120 dollars.
Hope this helps!</p>
<p>OP, I’m hijacking your thread a little…i’ll apologize right now</p>
<p>If you are considering price as the biggest factor in selecting a hard drive, does brand matter at all? Is it more important to go for the highest rotation speed and the most space available, or is it better to get a well known brand like hitachi or western digital over say a maxtor?</p>
<p>I use a WD, and have Time Machine automatically back my stuff up. It’s a huge convenience.</p>
<p>i’ve been using a western digital 500gb mybook for around a year now and it’s convenient to backup, though it’s hard to carry it around. i bought it for around $70 in a special deal, i’m sure they’re cheaper now. they’re really convenient because i divided it to two parts, one for the time machine backups and the other for data transfer between windows/mac, etc. you could look into smaller WDs too.</p>
<p>It might be cheaper and better to just get an internal hard drive and an external hard drive enclosure. As far as I know, most external hard drives are 5400 rpm while internal desktop hard drives are 7200 rpm.</p>
<p>[Newegg.com</a> - Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJS 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives](<a href=“Not Found: 404 Error”>Not Found: 404 Error)
[Newegg.com</a> - Rosewill RX35-AT-SU BLK Aluminum 3.5" Black USB 2.0 External Enclosure - External Enclosures](<a href=“Not Found: 404 Error”>Not Found: 404 Error)</p>
<p>between an internal and external, the difference in performance will be nominal because they have the same limitation on bandwidth from the USB connection. the prices are comparable.</p>
<p>places like best buy have sales on externals all the time</p>
<p>
Not really, the main difference is the ones that are able to be powered by USB only and don’t need a power outlet are 2.5" and the ones that need a power outlet to run are 3.5". The ones that are 2.5" are more likely to be 5400 RPM because it takes less power to spin the platters at that speed. The My external Drive is 7200 RPM and plenty of external drives are.</p>
<p>Don’t external drives use eSATA instead of USB? Either way, if that’s the case, you might as well go with the external.</p>
<p>they can use eSATA but not all computers have eSATA ports, not all external drives use eSATA, and eSATA doesn’t deliver power so you have to use an outlet if you use eSATA</p>
<p>You can get a WD external 500GB for about $80 or so dollars. Maybe even 1TB for $125.
Should be enough to suit your needs.</p>
<p>Toshiba 500GB, it costs less than $100 at Walmart.</p>
<p>what is going to be stored?
unless you’re archiving media, i think anything over 320 is overkill if your biggest concern is cost</p>