IT Professional

If you don't recall this topic, here is a brief history: The customer is working on an Imac running Macintosh OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). She would like to have an automated backup system running so she doesn't have to worry about her data if the hard drive was to fail. Our solution is to use Time Machine, which runs automated backups every hour, every day, every week and every month, to an external hard drive. My solution was to have her purchase a Fantom GreenDrive Quad Interface 1TB External hard drive.

How much space do you need in order to accomplish what you are trying to backup? Are you backing up a lot of word documents or pictures or videos? A good recommendation is to multiple what you need by two or three to allow for future expansion. In this case, we selected one terabyte.

2. Operating System Support

What operating system will this external hard drive be used on? There are several such as Windows, OS X, UNIX, etc. Make sure that the external hard drive supports your current version of operating system, which in this case is 10.6 or Snow Leopard, as well as any other machines you could potentially connect to it to.

3. Connectivity

What sort of connections will be used on your computer? Is it new enough that it supports eSATA? It is an older machine that doesn't have USB support. Does it support Firewire 800 or Firewire 400? I personally like to make sure that there is more than one method of being able to connect the external hard drive in case one interface fails so I made the suggestion to get an external hard drive with four interfaces: USB 2.0, eSATA, Firewire 400 & Firewire 800. The advantage of having eSATA is it supports 300MB of data transfered every second compared to USB 2.0, which only supports 60MB per second. I also made sure to get Firewire 800 because a lot of the newer Apple computers no longer have Firewire 400 connectors built-in.

It is always a good idea to ensure the product that you are purchasing has some sort of warranty. This would allow you to send your hard drive in for repair if it was to die prematurely before the warranty has expired. It also allows them to resolve any issue that might have been a manufacturing flaw or issue with the system.