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I'm looking for a better external physical drive to encourage much more frequent backups.

* Doesn't have to be huge: it's mostly for development backups and personal documents.
* Doesn't make noise (mine makes a fan noise when its wakes up)
* Ideally, doesn't need an extra power cable

Right now I'm using a simple IOMEGA external USB drive. This thing is so damn slow. I'm pretty sure it's a hard drive. Is the sole reason for being slow that it is using very little power to rotate the plates? Or is it because of USB 2.0 ? I'm also using two SDHC cards (16GB and 32GB) as secondary backups. They are about the same speed as the external IOMEGA drive, only less noisy.

I'm thinking maybe I should splurge for an external SSD drive. I could see myself paying upwards of 300 € if it's faster than a USB drive.

Does anyone have recommendations?

Zumodrive
http://www.zumodrive.com

Dropbox
http://www.dropbox.com

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I'm not looking for online backup solutions. I do an occasional DropBox backup but those are too slow.

The crux of my problem is I want something fast that I don't think twice about. DropBox is nice but will use up my upload bandwidth in the background. It can't be optimized with its database of "known" files when I'm uploading custom files like PSD's and development archives.

Maybe LaCie has something tailored to your needs? I'm quite fond of their external drives. I haven't tried their flash drive but it seems highly regarded: http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-iamakey-Flas...B004D2AZ0Q

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Those are cool but too small. I can use up to 32GB SDHC cards on my late 2009 iMac but not the SDXC unfortunately.

Get something with ESATA. You may have to install an adapter in your computer, but nothing beats the speed. Or you could get a NAS, that's what I back everything up on.

A possible solution that would work well is getting an internal drive instead of an external one. I'm not sure why it needs to be external. $90 will get you good speed and 2TB to work with.

An SSD will solve your problem if it's internal. For external operation, you need an ESATA enclosure, ESATA expansion card, and the drive. Though the drive is an order of magnitude more expensive than the other two.

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jcdietz03 Wrote:I'm not sure why it needs to be external

I'm working on an iMac. Plus I want multiple backups, and the ability to take the drive on a trip is a useful bonus.

Yeah the thing with the SSD is I'm just assuming it will be faster than the USB harddrive.

I guess I'm just looking for something bigger than the SDHC cards I use. The 32GB Sandisk card I use is class 4 and it says 15MB/s, which is sufficient for me. The problem with the IOMEGA drive, because it's a hard drive powered by USB is it takes some time to wake up, it makes noise, and it's slow as molasses to get a disk space usage of a directory with lots of files :/

If I had the 2010 iMac revision I think SDXC 64 GB would work which would be perfect, as I could use different cards for different needs (eg. iTunes/movies on one, and personal files on another). But the late 2009 model won't take SDXC (afaik), and 32 GB is just a little tight.

I'm assuming that an external SSD or large flash drive on a USB connector would be at least as fast as my SDHC cards..

Is the Time Capsule too slow? Can you give us some idea of the volume and rate of data that's being transferred? Is it 64 gb per day, or per week?

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No, no no. Much smaller. Less than a hundred megabytes per day.

I don't backup my system installation. I have a bunch of Bash scripts that make archives of application settings, development folders, documents and so on. I synchronize two folders on my harddrive with DirSyncPro. I wouldn't trust any automated backup solution and don't want my backups to be tied to any particular OS either.

I don't think I can get used to something automated. I want full control of my backups, know exactly what I backup and when. I want to do this manually once a day. Only when DirSyncPro goes on a SDHC card or USB thumb drive it's fairly fast, but the external IOMEGA drive is slow as molasses.

The external USB drives I offered you before are similarly slow. It seems to be a mix of the slow drive mechanism (to a small extent) and the slow interface of USB2.0 (to a larger extent). I have some 2.5" 7200rpm drives in bus powered FW/USB housings that are three times faster over FW than they are over USB.

I know this is a US company I am linking but OWC makes really nice little housing for 2.5" (thus bus powered) drives. Using them for FW is much much faster, and FW supplies much better power, where faster is much more reliable and daisy chainable to a second bus powered FW drive.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20W...STG800U2K/

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Ah FireWire! Duh me. The iMac has a firewire port, I'll have to investigate that. Thank you.

That external firewire case kit from OWC is very interesting. Has a DC port though.

You gave me just the nudge in the right direction though! I better do my homework now.

The DC port is for using it with USB on computer with underpowered drive USB drives. Mostly Macs have consistent strong USB power leads, but even Macs have trouble dealing with some drives. Those Seagates I offered you are a particular example. On a single lead USB cable, they would 'drop' under heavy load. (But they are 15mm 1TB drives.)

I always use a Y cable when using USB external bus powered drives now, because USB is just not consistent enough from computer to computer to know that you will get enough power to drive a hard drive. And when a drive drops off midwrite it ends ends with weird errors.

But with FW, I have daisy chained (run two external hard drives off of one computer FW port by connecting the FW from the computer, and connecting the next device to the first device) with no problems ever. FW is a much more reliable overall, including the 'wakeup' event that make the drive go back online. USB is kind of hit and miss about those.

And since you have USB also, you can carry you data to other computers no problem.

Since you mentioned being platform independent, it is worth pointing out that exFAT support is now built into OS X and WIndows 7 (don't know about Linux), and available as a free download for older versions of Windows.

(On the Mac it requires 10.6.? or above, so older Macs would be left out.

In my playing with exFAT, it is pretty nice to not need MacDrive or some NTFS-3g hack to write disks Mac and WIndows can both read and write.

Oh and in case you are thinking about it, those Seagate drives I offered you are a funky 15mm tall so they would not fit in the OWC case completely I tried putting one in the enclosure. If fit in the aluminum carrier tray, but the plastic cover would not slide over.

If you do not mind having a bare drive, it would work though. I can still send you the drive if you were going to buy an enclosure and you did not care about fitting the top cover on it. As they are though, they are pretty dang slow. 1 TB in a bus powered housing is nice, but they really need to USB Y-Cable to get enough power, and they are stinking slow.

Unfortunately, in general, Macs are much slower with USB than FW in the real world. They are even slower than PCs using USB. Once you switch to FW, then the performance takes a big leap.

OWC does sell the same housing with drives which is a better deal. Same housing with a preintalled 750gb 2.5" drive is $170.00

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20W...U7750GB16/

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Oh, yeah, to be fair I should have mentioned I'm using NTFS-3G so I can write to the BOOTCAMP drive, and my external drive is formatted as NTFS.

Thanks for the exFAT tip, that is sweet! I'm using Windows 7 so that would work!

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kapalama Wrote:Since you mentioned being platform independent, it is worth pointing out that exFAT support is now built into OS X and WIndows 7 (don't know about Linux), and available as a free download for older versions of Windows.

Found a speed comparison here, exFAT is (very slightly) faster on an external drive.
http://dimig.blogspot.com/2011/03/file-s...r-usb.html

But I also read a thread that said the exFAT partition created from OS X can not be read by Windows 7 in OS X 10.6.5. That may have been fixed in 10.6.6 though. Still investigating.

I'm already in the process of reformatting my current drive as exFAT to get rid of NTFS-3G.

EDIT: I confirm that my external drive formatted as exFAT with Disk Utility in 10.6.7 was not recognized by Windows 7. I formatted in W7 and it can be read by OSX.

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Sweet! Read/write speed seems a little better but it seems the biggest problem I had is that getting file directories took forever. I couldn't use the external drive to browse pictures or mp3 etc, it would take forever to make thumbnails or even just show a file list in the Finder.

On the other hand, I noticed that exFAT in OSX doesn't maintain file permissions. It also shows the cluster size in the Finder. Mine was set at 128K so small text files all show as "131 KB".

If you were using NTFS-3g on that drive, it is the NTFS-3g that made things slow, rather than the drive itself, or the interface. NTFS-3g, for me, was remarkably slow. I tried first 4 years ago, then would install it once a year to see if anything had changed. It never did. I found it quicker to read and write files through a wireless network (and a B network at that, not a G or N network) than through directly connected NTFS drives when using NNTFS-3g. It is an absolute pig. (Which is strange because the Linux brand of NTFS-3g is apparently as fast as native ext2/ext3. But NTFS-3g for Mac has always been pretty much a one man effort.)

MacDrive was always just fast enough, so that's what use. NTFS-3g is quite simply unusably slow.

But exFAT gives near native speeds. ALmost as fast as HFS+, and definitely faster than FAT32. I am copying large files and few of them, so YMMV since you are copying small files and lots of them.

Your experience with exFAT, is interesting. I have had a drive not recognized by a Windows XP computer using the addon exFAT support, but that was after an island wide power outage during a disk cloning operation. Clean drives have remained readable.

The lack of permission maintenance I would take as a given since it is at heart a version of FAT.

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They have a paid version that's supposedly faster. I installed the free version.

Possibly relevant I found a thread on Steam forums and they said OSX 's implementation of exFAT is case sensitive whereas the blueprint says it shouldn't. This maybe have something to do with Windows 7 not seeing it, if formatted from OSX.

The paid version (Paragon NTFS) is built on the Linux NTFS-3g base, and then worked into a usable commercial product (though some people have reported a number of problems like making partitions unreadable to OS X's native NTFS read support.)

The Mac version of NTFS-3g is a weekend project of one guy, who was trying to get any NTFS write support under OS X, not create a viable commercial product.

NOte: By default, The thumb drives are all FAT32, while the big drives are all NTFS. That's why your thumb drives were faster, because they were not being run under NTFS-3g, which is as I mentioned, remarkably slow.

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Oh I see. I thought it was the same guy.

Well I know who to talk to for Mac troubleshooting! You should go on apple.stackexchange.com you'll rack up points like there's no tomorrow (big time sink though)

Only if I have had the same trouble. I know these particular things because I fought with them, and spent time bugging people for answers.

I was fully cross-platform a couple years ago, and the lack of a solution like exFAT was a real problem. I got by with MacDrive though.