Buy Iomega 34744 640GB Prestige Portable Hard Drive, Compact Edition

I've always used WD [Western Digital] hard drives but gave Iomega a shot after reading the horrific reviews of WD's unnecessary redesign of their WD Passport drives. This drive has no such problems. The cable stays in plugged in and there is no proprietary software that automatically loads and hijacks your computer like WD. The drive is barely audible unless you put your ear right up to it. The exterior brushed metal enclosure is very slick and the overall design is incredibly small, very minimal and refined so it goes along well with my MacBook Pro. My old macbook pro is able to power the drive just fine with one usb cord. In the event that you don't have usb 2.0 or a powerful enough computer to handle this latest technology, there is a supplemental power-only usb cord that is for additional power. Essentially, you would plug the drive into two usb ports [no, this won't increase transfer rates -- it's just for power].
The drive comes pre-formatted as Windows NTFS which is perfect for windows users. This will be a problem for mac users to write to the drive unless they reformat the drive per the included instructions. While Mac reformats incredibly fast compared to pc's, they can legally can only allow the formatting of drives into their own native file system, making it impossible to read/write on a PC. MAC can also reformat it as the archaic Windows FAT32 file system [thank you for your generosity microsoft]. FAT32 will allow for transfer between the Mac and PC, but it limits the file sizes to 4GB or less so that you can't transfer movie files or other files larger than 4GB. An alternative is to keep the NTFS pre-format and install "NTFS for MAC" by Paragon Software Group [on sale for $27.95 -- not a plug, I just really like it]. There are other softwares and free mac tweaks as well that you can find by scouring the web. These all should allow for your mac to read and write to the windows NTFS format seamlessly and therefor you will be able to transfer massive movie files [etc.] between your PC's and Mac.
Enjoy!
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