Thanks Ranulph. <http://www.maplin.co.uk/buy-hard-drives-and-memory/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives> I have two of the following:
* Seagate 3TB Backup Plus External Hard Drive – USB 3.0, but limited to USB 2.0 with my 2009 MacBookPro5,2. One of the two is pooled with an older 2 TB Seagate GoFlex Desk. The other 3 TB drive was loaned to a friend for a few months, eventually it'll take the place of the 2 TB drive (for a ~6 TB pool). I'm pleased with these three Seagate drives, and preferred to buy locally rather than online. (There's a premium for local over the counter. With friends who purchased other brands online, I observed that they simply didn't return disks that failed. In other words, the economy is lost when (like me) you're too lazy to arrange returns online.) I understand that there are fancy electronics in *good* Thunderbolt cables/adapters but to me, £150 for <http://www.maplin.co.uk/seagate-thunderbolt-adapter-for-seagate-backup-plus-desktop-drives-635540> seems excessive. For my 2009 Mac the £30 for a FireWire adapter <http://www.maplin.co.uk/seagate-firewire-800-adapter-for-seagate-backup-plus-goflex-desktop-drive-396343> is much more appealing. I feel a trip to London Road coming on. Two, maybe three of those adapters. On the other hand … … my longer term plan is to use all three desktop drives with a hand-me-down Dell desktop configured as a NAS. And that Dell lacks FireWire. Hmm, a third hand: my initial experiments with FreeNAS on the Dell (with USB 2.0 for the Seagate drives) were disappointing. Disappointing in a way that made me appreciate the simplicity and reliability that's associated with Apple (Mac + OS X). ---- Until around a year ago I never felt the need for anything better than USB 2.0. More recently, I learnt (through experience) to believe the people who point out that whilst commonplace, USB 2.0 is simply not a good choice for some approaches to storage. But that's another story. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/smug. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
