I just connected another hard drive to my iMac which meant I ended up with the mess shown below. That’s 4 drives, with 1.8TB of space (that’s in addition to the 500GB in the iMac itself). Seems like overkill to me. In my defense I submit that I’m paranoid about backups and as far as I’m concerned a file doesn’t exist unless it’s in two places. To make matters worse I don’t consider RAID or my WHS file duplication to be two places since it’s still one device. Still, things [...] Read the rest »
Seagate FreeAgent Go 80GB USB External Drive
I was in Staples before Christmas and they had the Seagate FreeAgent Go external drives on sale. I’ve never bought a 2.5″ external drive before because of concerns over reliability. But at about fifty cents a gig and the small size I decided to get the 80GB version. The small size would make it easier to carry and use with my MacBook. The five year warranty assuages my reliability concerns a bit. The 2.5″ 5400rpm drive is 4.8 x 0.7 x 3.9 inches in size and weighs less than 5 [...] Read the rest »
WD My Book Button Manager Removed and Some Frustrations
I decided to remove the Button Manager drivers (Mac) for my Western Digital My Book 500GB drive. The button manager software is used to provide: 1. the capacity gauge that shows the drive space used 2. Safe shutdown (by pushing the drive button) Since installing the My Book drivers I’ve had one case when my iMac just pin-wheeled when waking from sleep mode and I had to force a power off. I can’t say it was the cause but when there’s a problem the last change is usually the place [...] Read the rest »
Western Digital My Book Moved to iMac
I’ve had my 500GB Western Digital My Book drive for over a month and just got around to moving it to my Mac after testing in on my Windows PC. Click on the previous link to go to my post where I write about the drive and installing it under Windows.My intent all along was to use it as a drive dedicated to my iMac. Because of this I want to reformat the drive using HFS+ [Mac OS Extended (Journaled)] file system rather than FAT32. If you want to move [...] Read the rest »
Maxtor OneTouch III Update
I first wrote about the Maxtor OneTouch III back in December and now that I’ve had it awhile it’s a good time for an update. I’ve been running it connected to my iMac since my initial review. I also gave one to my father as to use as a backup drive with a Windows PC. The hardware has been reliable. My main complaint is it’s slower than other drives when spinning up from sleep mode. It’s fast enough for use as a backup drive although I haven’t tried running applications [...] Read the rest »
Western Digital My Book 500GB Drive w/ EMC Retrospect Software
I purchased the Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500 GB External Hard Drive with Triple Interface (slight variations in the name indicate different models so be sure to check the specs when buying) to become a backup drive for my iMac, but I want to give it a spin under Windows first. This article is my first impression of the drive and Restrospect Backup software (included) under Windows. I mentioned the drive last month when I commented on a Computerworld review that picked the drive over the other 3 [...] Read the rest »
Bits and Pieces
Another week has gone by. It being tax time and all (yea I waited) I didn’t have time to put together any additional articles but I do have a bunch of little things I’ve either started or have noticed around the web. Rather than a lot of small posts, or ignoring them completely, I decided to summarize them here. Software News Hawk Wings had news of Correo 0.2 which is an open source e-mail client based on Camino and Thunderbird. With my move off of mail.app due to some problems [...] Read the rest »
Maxtor OneTouch III
While I didn’t get the Maxtor OneTouch to use as a backup drive I decided to take the included backup software for a test drive to see how it works before hooking it up to my Mac. The Specs From The Box Firewire 400, IEEE 1394, i.Link and SBP-2 compliant USB 2.0 and 1.1 Compliant Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later, Windows 2000 or XP Included in the box: External hard drive, USB cable, 6 to 6 pin Firewire 400/1394/i.Link cable, External power, CD with backup software (Mac and Windows) [...] Read the rest »
