Graham, I have used Lacie in the past. But have been switching to Western Digital for the last two years. Only last week bought a 500 Gb Western Digital My Passport Essential. It is certainly very small and USB 2 bus powered. Though it needs to be run off the machine. I tried a powered hub and that did not work.
You will need a intel mac to be able to boot from USB. Firewire will boot on all macs. There is a FW version called My Passport Studio which may be the best bet for what you need. I hope that has helped. David > For the past 3+ years, I've been buying and using portable/mini drives for my > bootable backup drives and for storing backup data too. Now I've switched all > my computers to Snow Leopard (from Tiger) I'm using them for TM backups too. > For all the time I've been buying them, I've used Formac 'disk mini'. They've > been excellent, and they come with both FW and USB connections. I need the > portability these mini disks offer (but I use full-size external drives too). > > Now it seems much more difficult to buy Formac disk mini drives. My original > suppliers (DABS, ebuyer, solutions-inc) have all stopped stocking them. And, > if I can find them anywhere, it rarely includes the firewire version. If you > follow the suppliers link on the Formac website, none of the suppliers listed > now appear to keep these drives. Does anyone know what' s up with Formac and > why getting these drives is now very difficult? > > And is there an alternative manufacturer (but not Lacie) that people would > recommend using for mini drives? Western Digital seems to be the most > prolific. I use their internal drives, but have read many reviews stating > their portables are not so good. In addition, many of the alternative > manufacturers seem to only have a USB port which is fine for backups but > presumably no good to boot from? Am I right that only a FW external drive can > be booted from? > > So what do you do, and what would you recommend? > Thanks, Graham > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Sussex Mac User Group" group. > To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB.
