External hard drive for Macbook Air

[levain]

Whats the best one? Around 500gb. The reviews make it sound like none of them work with the Air. I just want one that will work with little drama

[bwringer]

Take yer pick. Any USB hard drive will work fine. Where are you seeing reports of problems?

You will need to reformat it with Disk Utility before use, but that takes maybe 30 seconds.

My favorite source for Mac bits, Other World Computing:
http://macsales.com

I don't see the point of paying more for a Thunderbolt drive.

[syntec4]

I have a WD 'Mybook' 1Tb. Works fine with my 13" 2011 Air. As others said I had format it first time but it was easy even for me. It was cheap from Costco.

[bergermeister]

I'd go with a usb 3.0 drive

[Doc.Snyder]

Iomega has a nice USB 3.0 SSD. Like it a lot. Fast as hell. Use it to run Win 8 to go.

[SnowMule]

For backup/storage? 5400RPM laptop drive, size of your choosing. I picked up a couple 500GB WD Scorpio Blue drives for $70 a pop, USB enclosure for $6.

IMO, "external HD's" are a scam, you can get a same/better quality drive for less by buying the drive and an enclosure for it. (exceptions being network/LAN enclosures.)

I prefer to zero the drives before using them... that option's under "erase options" in disk utility. Let it run overnight, it'll take a couple of hours on a larger drive.

[rattlesnakejake]

I use a couple of different external drives/enclosures from Otherworld Computing. They've all been great. If you are trying to keep a small footprint with things and actually travel the drive with you I would suggest you get something that is 'bus powered' (drive powered from USB bus...no external AC adapter required). If you're going to just get something that sits on your desk at home then it's really not a big deal.

Without completely spamming you... http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other...g/MSU35500GB8/

You can get cooler, cheaper, bigger, smaller, or more storage but that's a good starting point.

[CodeMonkee]

I have a WD USB 2 160 GB drive that works fine for my MBA, my MacPro, my work Dell and anything else it hooks up to. Don't know why any other USB drive wouldn't work, regardless of format or type (Macs read NTFS/DOS format fine last time I checked - if my work Dell can read it, then it isn't an OSX format).

The only problems you might have is if you try to use it with Time Machine.

[barnyard]

Pretty sure I have a Syquest drive with a bunch of discs I would sell ya cheap.

[MrBob]

I use a WD Mac specific drive as a backup, which I needed after a recent crash. This is a refurbished unit I bought on Amazon.

[levain]

Thanks for all the answers. I ended up going with a Seagate 2TB drive. Now, I'm trying to use it and am confused

I hooked it up to my macbook air. It recognized it right away and after I told it to back up, it started doing its thing. So far so good.

My ultimate goal is to move all of my iTunes music onto the external from the old shared family macbook. I was under the impression that I could just plug in the external when I wanted to do iTunes stuff. I followed this link and was able to move the few albums that I have on my macbook air. I even bought a new one as a test from the iTunes store. It went straight onto the external which is great.

A couple issues I'm having;
-I subscribe to iTunes match. This particular album is not in the cloud. I bought it through the iTunes store, so I can't figure out why it isn't.
-My understanding was that I'd be able to transfer my music to the external, and I'd be able to open up iTunes and it would look like it does on my laptop. Does it not work that way?
-When I first purchased the album, it was in iTunes. After I unplugged the external and plugged it back in, its not there anymore (in itunes).

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong?

[SnowMule]

ITuens is pretty picky about where and how the music is organized, and it seems like it's only getting worse as versions roll on.

You'll need to point iTuens to your library... if you have a library built already, you'll need to do some work on COPIES OF the library files, to move the directories elsewhere so it can still find things.

I moved my music library to my server, mount that network volume on the local machine and work with it there. The share's set to read-only so Itunes can't fuck with it, I can set it read/write if I need to change something.