Toshiba 1TB external drive for back up?

Considering Toshiba 1tb external drive for backing up iPhoto and iTune libraries plus movie files and general document and graphic files from PBg4 Tiger 10.4.11.

Drive costs about £70 from amazon and sounds like a good deal.

It comes FAT32 formatted .

Do I need to reformat or will I be able to use it as is? Have about 5000 photos at the moment but this is an ever expanding library. About 14gb on iTunes and a whole lot more to put on there.

Confess that I hardly ever back anything up, apart from on to blank dvds on odd occasion, so about time I turned over a new leaf!

Any advice on suitability of this drive and the best way to go about backing up would be appreciated.

Steve

Mac OSX can read/write to FAT32 but note the format can not store files greater than or equal to 4GB in size and is prone to fragmentation. Unless you plan on using the drive in a Windows environment your best bet is to reformat it with Disk Utility (Applications / Utilities), choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If you're thinking of streaming videos stored on the drive then make sure it has firewire.

If you're thinking of going for a USB Hard Drive, check that your PB G4 is USB 2 equipped, as early models were not. If you go to 'About This Mac', click More Info and post here the Model Identifier I should be able to confirm it.

USB '1' is painfully slow for large file transfers and I wouldn't recommend it.

Firewire equipped HD's are much better in my opinion. They provide much better sustained reads/writes so if you're copying files around a lot or running iTunes/playing movies from it you'll probably notice a difference.

Edited by deleted (Tue 14-Apr-09 21:02:24)

You get what you pay for lol.

I bought a WD 1TB my book studio edition. Comes Mac formatted and has USB2, eSATA, FW400 and FW800. £129.

Looks pretty good too, they've styled it to compliment a Mac pro or Macbook pro.

An external 3.5 case with a SATA 1TB drive will work, just needs some assembly.

Thanks to all for advice and the how to information.

Toshiba doesn't have firewire. PB does have 400 and 800 plus usb2.

The WD 1TB my book studio edition does sound a better bet.

Having a look round various boards with user reviews, it seems that someone somewhere has horror tales to tell, re losing vast amounts of work due to drive failure involving most, if not all, of the well known brands.

Some advocate 500 x 2 in same drive enclosure - both discs carry identical data - if one disc fails everything backed up on other. Is this good idea perhaps?