What are the odds?

Ken, I like the Hitachi drives, they are the old IBM drives, and they are slightly more expensive….you are better off buying the drive and the enclosure separately, its easy to switch the drives in and out of the enclosures easily. You can get them here http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/?source=txtFireWire
Are you sure those are USB, not firewire connections you have? Either way the two are there so you can chain them together if you want…I wouldn’t buy at Costco, Walmart, etc,

hmmm…did you connect to powered USB connections ? Mac or Windows?

The WD drives are gone. The cord that came with them was a usb 2.0, regular on one side mini on the other. I think it was actually a bad drive or housing. It would show up on my desktop and then vanish when I tried to do something. I thought it was a bad cord and switched it out, but had the same result. Then it started to click. Costco took them back with no problem.

The Seagate drive is a usb 2.0, mini on one side the forks into two regular usb connections. I assumed it was designed to hook up two drives and only plugged one of the usb’s into my laptop. Then I read the directions and the drive needs two usb’s to function. I plugged both into the laptop and everything worked right away.

I hadn’t seen the dual usb head before, so that was the mistake. Well, that and not reading the directions.

The Seagates come with a bunch of PC based back-up software and need to be reformatted to work with the Mac. My only real question, is what format is best to reformat into?

I’ve gotten into the habit of backing up on the road to two of the small pocket sized hard drives. So that’s why I buy at Costco or Best Buy. They’re cheap and you have two copies. The jpeg selects are ftp’d off, it’s the raw files that I’m concerned with here.

I think both the usb connections in the 12” powerbook G4 are powered.

Thanks,
Ken

Yeah, I was surprised to see the drive housing available on their own at Best Buy today.

I bought a Seagate 500 gig( for my Mac) and had a similar problem -ie. I could hear the drive but no icon appeared on desktop. Then as a last resort I referred to the instructions and low and behold all I had to do is reformat it with disc utilities. Result: it works perfectly

I use WD as desk top back up and it’s terrific. I use Seagate on the road. That two usb thing is a pain but it’s rock solid and was highly recommended. I use an old Mac laptop. I never had to format anything. Just plugged in and away I went.

I have USB ports on both sides of my laptop. The ones on the right don’t deal with power very well, so devices that require power from the bus don’t work. Drives spin and click because the electricity is not consistent.

The ports on the left work fine.

I use the left ports for external HDs, including Western Digital ones, and the right ports for card readers and other connections that don’t require power.

All my USB ports should work the same, but the computer has the problem, not the drives.

Western Digital used to make great stuff but they’ve been turned into the budget line since Seagate took them over a few years ago. I don’t use WD anymore. Seagate is my preferred drive.

Kenneth—

If you’re referring to a supplied USB “Y” cable, that’s because the drive needs more power to fully spin up and be functional than a single USB port can provide, thus the need for two cables, since each USB bus has a maximum amount of power output. This is typically not the same with firewire drives, as the power that comes through there is sufficient. further, if you’re using a Mac, you can boot to a FW disk, not a USB one.

The drives, using an external power supply will fully spin up and give you an icon on your desktop.

John

Just format using extended and journaled with no os9 drivers and you should be good to go.

“I could hear the drive but no icon appeared on desktop. Then as a last resort I referred to the instructions and low and behold all I had to do is reformat it with disc utilities. Result: it works perfectly”

Chip or others.. Could u clarify this a bit…
How can u enable disk utility to format a disk for which there is no icon visible on the desktop? Doesn’t the program ask you which disk to select based on what it sees on the desktp? What is the short cut around that ?
Thanks

When you open mac utilities, the progam will recognize the driver as well as displaying the driver icon even though you may not see it on your desktop. Ckick on the drive icon( via utilities) and format it. The icon will then appear on you desktop at least this is what I did and it worked fine.

ken,
Were you able to figure out the process and have it work for you?

Thanks to everyone.
I did get the new drives running properly btw.
Regardless as files get bigger, storage seems like it’s always going to be a problem.