I have an amazon voucher to spend and would like to get a hard drive to back up all the photos and music on my iMac. Anything especially good, or anything to particularly avoid? Up to £40 or thereabouts.

I mainly use Freecom drives with my Macbook, and they have never let me down yet after several years of use.* Have both the desktop and portable versions.

These days you should be fine with getting the most space for your £, regardless of manufacturer. Just need to decide whether you want bus powered or off the mains.

At the moment the WD drives seem very good value for 1TB for £49.

*Cue massive data loss.

the only thing you need to consider is firewire. If your mac is old enough not to have USB 2 then you need to find a firewire drive and will pay a bit of a premium to get one. But if you can use USB 2 the get anything you like, theres nothing mac-specific to worry about

I like Lacie, nice to look at and quiet in use. Also got a iomega one that has the brightest. flashiest, most distracting blue light on it and makes a noise like a flamenco dancer when I do backups

How do I tell if it’s USB 2 or not? It’s 2 years old.

EDIT Found it.

if you get a WD drive download the uninstall thingy from WD. there’s an annoying bit of software that mounts on the desktop as a cd. you don’t need it and it’s annoying. do this before formatting or copying anything across.

I’m using an Iomega eGo, so far so good using it for timemachine, no problems,
PJ.