If you're really looking for something small that you can take with you everywhere you go look into 'Portable Hard Drive'. Western Digital, Seagate and LaCie all make decent portables that will work with a mac. The biggest pain about portables is that they will be bus-powered (meaning that they draw power from a USB port or Firewire port). Bus-powered USB drives require 2 simultaneous USB slots and the macbook pro 15" only has 2 total (and they are conveniently placed on opposite sides of the laptop!). Bus-powered Firewire drives require a 6-pin connector and not a 4-pin connector. The macbook pro does have a 6-pin Firewire 400 port (which is rare for a laptop) plus a Firewire 800 port so a Firewire model would be a good bet.

If you're looking for ultimate Apple compatability, you could always use a high-capacity iPod classic in disc mode (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61131)

If you're really looking for a good backup drive, I would suggest getting a regular external hard drive that sits on your desk that you hook up whenever you are at your desk and specifically looking to backup your data. Portables are more likely to fail as a backup device because of the unnecessary wear-and-tear put on them by traveling. With a portable you are also more vulnerable to losing your precious backed-up data or even having it stolen. Non-portable external hard drives also give you the biggest capacities since portables are usually smaller in storage space. Also, if you primarily work at your desk or even just "dock" it there at night with a good high capacity external drive you can make the most of Time Machine (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html) if you are running OS X Leopard.

Cheers.

answered 1 year, 1 month ago
0 replies, write reply,  report

spam offtopic offensive

submitting...