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External Hard Drive Recommendation?


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I bought a Western Digital 500 GB MyBook external hard drive to use as a backup drive for my Retrospect 6.0.212 daily backups. After about a month, Retrospect was unable to backup to the drive any more, giving me a "drive reported a failure: dirty heads, bad media, etc." error message.

 

I returned the drive for a replacement, and the same thing is now happening again (within a month of getting the replacement drive).

 

The files I backup every night are very large ones; I'm an illustrator and work on many very large (500 MB and up) files everyday, and I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Perhaps the drive is overheating, transferring many GBs of data every night?

 

The machine that the MyBook is attached to is a MDD G4 1.25 Ghz running OS 10.3.9, and is backing up my working machine, a G5 running 10.4.10 over my Ethernet network.

 

If anyone has any suggestions of a good, large external HD that works well with Macs, I'd be most grateful. I intend to buy a Mac Mini to replace the G4 in the next few months, if that makes a difference in HD recommendations.

 

Many thanks in advance!

 

-Zina

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While the drive does have an important contribution to make to reliability, in many instances the determining factor is the case - its interface chips, power supply, and cooling. The issue with the MyBook seems to be cooling, in that it doesn't seem to be able to handle the continuous duty hard pumping of data that Retrospect does. Occasional transfers by the Finder, seems to work OK. Wish I had some good suggestions for you.

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