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You can ask every computer user if they had the choice of losing their computer setup or their data which one would they prefer. The answer is unanimous and I’m in the same boat. I have two internal drives in my G5 totaling 800Gbs and my three external drives total another 750Gbs. Pair that with an iBook and a 60Gb iPod. I would say that storage is a big deal to me. I archive everything on my Mac just like so many of you. Photos, music, home videos and application installers just in case that CD gets lost. I have one external 500Gb drive that backs up the important stuff on my internal drives and I’m contemplating a 1.5 terabyte system that backs up all of my drives once a week.

I have gone through drives that fail, have errors, speed issues or come from the factory broken so I feel its my duty to assist in educating the computing community on finding the right drive. Most importantly, if you have a desktop or the technical know how, I recommend an internal drive. They carry 3-year warranty and you know what you’re getting when you buy one. A great example, those cheap external USB 2.0 drives from Office Max come equipped with crappy internal drives and only carry a one-year warranty. I can purchase a high end Seagate or western digital drive (no Maxtor for me) and put it in a 49 dollar USB / FireWire external enclosure for the same price as some external drives that only carry the one year warranty.

Another tip is to not buy Maxtor. Working in the tech industry, I have seen tons of Maxtor drives go bad after a few months. Dell has even stopped using Maxtor drives on its high-end machines if that’s a sign for you. Apple uses Toshiba drives and I personally love Seagate. Get a drive with a high amount of cache and the slower the seek time the better. 7200RPM is standard these days and if you really want a 10K drive, just be aware that these drives have deeper and louder clicks as they seek across the drive for data.

If you’re don’t have a lot of technical know-how or just don’t have time to make an external drive, I would recommend LaCie drives. Pronounced lu-C not laycee, these drives are exceptional and offer minimal fails and look great on a desk. They match Apple’s pro machines perfectly and have great I/O in the form of USB and Firewire a/ b. These drives are also priced reasonably but do a Google search for “LaCie Clearance corner� and these refurbished / overstock drives are priced just right less than .50 cents per gigabyte. However, LaCie’s F.A. Porche drives are crap. I have gone through three of these drives and got tired of getting the drives replaced after multiple bad disk errors

If you’re looking for a portable drive that is powered over the Firewire bus, I would look for the Mercury On-The-Go drives. They are small, fast and get the job done. They are very expensive due to the size and quality of the drives but their price per gigabyte is around 3 dollars which is cheap compared to other external travel drives.

At the end of the day it’s all about the data. Find a good backup procedure which I recommend Intego Personal Backup X4 because its always running and does backup jobs in the background and even creates a bootable copy of my OS on the external hard drive. I suggest an external drive the same size as your internal drive and when Apple’s Leopard OS ships with the included Time machine software for backups and retrieval of old files, a drive double the size of your internal storage will be crucial because Time machine backs up multiple versions of every file.