Can I Use This HD as a Main HD?

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I’m a bit of a newbie & I just had my iMac HD die this morning and am functioning at the moment off a 2 year old back-up External HD.  I am thinking that rather than spring for a new iMac and have to upgrade all my software (I’m running OS Tiger), that it would be cheaper and just as well to get 2 new WD External HDs and use one as a new Back-Up and use the other as my actual “new HD.”

Is this possible?  What is the difference between a HD that is being used as an “external back-up” and an internal one?  I had this happen 2 years ago, and the guy installed an internal Seagate 500MB HD (which cost $100), while he charged me $500-600 to do this and transfer the data.  Then he had me go to Best Buy and get another $100 external 500MB HD to use as the backup (which is what I’m running off of this moment.)  I do not see what the difference is between a $100 internal and  a $100 external - it just seems like a racket to scare me into paying unnecessarily.

Am I wrong?  Can my idea work?

Thanks in advance for your input & advice!

Dee

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Hi there, what you want to do is actually pretty normal, and getting 2 external drives to ahve the same data is a smart decision. Now, for an external drive to work as your main drive, the drive needs to allow booting and your computer needs to have a firewire port.

Here’s a list of bootable and non-bootable WD drives you can use for that.

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Thanks for the info!  I was looking at this one that is on their main WD website but I don’t see it anywhere on the lists!:

It’s just called " My Book for Mac" 

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That one won’t work, I’ll give you a suggestion but because you’re on Tiger I suspect something I’ll need to confirm… So can you please click on the Apple on the upper-left, select “About this Mac” and share what the screen will show? The processor is very important on this!

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The processor is: 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

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Then get this drive

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Thanks Pizza Matrix - are you sure this will use Tiger?  Its spec say Lion, Leopard, Snow Leopard

The only one I could find that said OS 10.4.10+ was the Studio II  

None of these mention being bootable in their specs (unless I’m missing it somewhere!)

Thank you!

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That drive itself is on this list of bootable drives, which says it should be bootable with your Intel-based Mac. The drive itself should work on Tiger if it’s 1TB, but if you want a safe bet then go for the Studio II :slight_smile: