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If you wanted to eliminate the middleman altogether, and just use the macbook, you could just take it into an apple store along with your dell and let them transfer everything for you.

I had bad luck with a pair of Maxtor drives, and then I had a pair of Lacie drives...one of which died two months out of the one year warranty, and both of them had _very_ noisy fans.

I've replaced them with Seagate Freeagent drives and so far they're fantastic. Nearly silent and they have a 5 year warranty. I'm very pleased. I think newegg.com had a very good deal on the "pro" version, around $100 shipped for a 500gb drive.

anyone know how silent the Time Machine is?

If you go with the Seagate FreeAgent Pro, don't expect the SATA interface to ever work. They seem relatively reliable on USB, but the SATA interface is fully broken (a google search will demonstrate how badly).

In addition, the bottom of the stand on the FreeAgent gets into the 170-200 degree F temperature range, which is good enough to put a dark mark on whatever you sit it on, or maybe cook some eggs in a pinch.

I recently just gave up and took the drive out of the enclosure on my 750gb model.

For external/removable/portable backup, I've switched to a 2.5" form factor drive in a small iogear enclosure. The performance is slightly worse based on specs, but I can't tell the difference since it's not my primary storage. Saves power, doesn't required another AC wall wart like the Freeagent, still supports both USB and SATA, and fits in my pocket.

Western Digital has some very slick pre-packaged 2.5" setups that work extremely well and look like nice little moleskins, so if you don't need the SATA support (and it sounds like you don't) I think they're the perfect combination of performance, style, and green that seems to be popular with the AT crowd.

~K

I just dealt with a similar problem this weekend. My solution was to buy the cheapest reliable internal hard drive on New Egg, and place it in an external enclosure myself. Macally makes an aluminum hard drive enclosure that looks just like a Mac Pro tower, so I stuck the drive in there and hooked it up to an Airport Extreme. Now my old data is available over my wireless network, and it looks very Mac-ish, as well!

However, you should note that if your old data from your Dell is on an NTFS hard drive, you're going to need to use a different format on the middle-man hard drive. OS X can only read NTFS - not write. Which is fine if you never plan to add any more data from the Mac, but that's doubtful. At least, that's been my experience.

kingtd - thanks for the tip on the Western Digitals... questions though... what does SATA mean?

it looks like i'm down to deciding between the Time Machine and Western Digital.


confusednazgul - let me get this straight... if i put stuff from my Dell on the new hard drive, my Mac won't be able to write to it? But I can access the old stuff?

i have a simpletech pinanfarina style one. it's very quiet, if that's a concern. says it's mac and pc compatible, but i've only used the latter. drag and drop works very fast, but if you use the software to do a full backup, it takes a long long time. don't know how it compares to other products, though.

I've read that the Time Machine takes an incredibly long time to backup files--like days.

Does anyone know if the airport express can take a multiple usb hub? So that I can attach both a printer and external hard drive.

STAY AWAY FROM THE SIMPLETECH!

I bought a simpletech pinafarina drive at Costco that I absolutely could not get to work with my powerbook to save my life. In the process it burnt out one of my USB hook-ups. Stay away from those as fast as you can.
They're not guaranteed to work with Macs, and from what I've seen, they're spotty, and who wants to take up 2 whole spots of USB to use the thing.

I traded it in for a Western Digital pocket drive, couldn't be happier with it. It's amazing. Love it to death. I recommend those.

Stay away from LaCie's too, they're not as reliable. In film school EVERYONE had problems with their LaCie drives. My school stopped recommending students buy them and switched to the Western Digital MyBook drives. Do it to it with the Western Digital!

Those Seagate ones are pretty reliable, though a bit ugly IMO.

Courtney,

OS X can read drives that were formatted with the NTFS file system, but can't write to them. However, this really isn't a problem unless you plan on taking apart your old laptop and taking the hard drive out.

What you'll need to do is get your old Dell and your new MacBook onto the same network. Turn on file sharing on both computers. Once you have both computers talking to each other on the network you can simply drag the files from the Dell over to whatever drive you have attached to your Mac. It's probably best to transfer the files in chunks, Windows can have difficulty with really large transfers.

As for what drive to use there's a few factors to consider. Do you need to take the files with you? If yes you'll want to consider a pocket drive. Western Digital was mentioned above, they make very nice portable drives. The max size you can get at the moment is 500GB. It's not the most secure way of keeping your files though. I wouldn't recommend storing irreplaceable files on one without keeping a copy somewhere else.

If you don't need the files with you and you're not overly concerned with data security a standard external drive would work well. Most of these max out around 1TB (1000GB). Again, Western Digital MyBooks are a pretty decent option. I personally like OWC external drives from www.macsales.com. While the chance of a hard drive failure within 3 years is pretty slim, there's still a slight risk of data loss.

If you need really strong data security I would suggest getting an external drive like the OWC Guarding Maximus (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax). This has two drives in it that are mirror copies of each other. If one drive fails, you still have the other with all of your data. This is pretty overkill though, and definitely expensive ($280 ).

Enjoy the new Mac!

If you're looking for something portable I highly recommend the Western Digital Passport. It comes in tons of sizes (160GB - 320GB) and colors but most importantly it's very reliable.

But if you don't need to carry the files around with you I love the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop line. You can get a 1TB for less than $200 and it's quite pretty IMO.

Also I'd highly try and see the hard drive you want yourself before you buy it only because I own a Maxtor portable drive and it's blue blinking light drove me so crazy I went out and bought a WD Passport. The Seagate hard drives come with a nice low key orange glow.

If you're just looking for a simple external drive, they all work the same way so usability is basically not a factor.

If you're going to store your music collection on this drive, it'll likely be on your desk -all- the time so just get something good looking.

I'd go with one of these black or gold ones.