My Book for Mac Necessary? HD Questions

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I was just at Best Buy where I saw a 1TB My Book For Mac for $100 and a 2TB My Book Essential for $90.  The specs say that the Essential is also compatible with Mac.  Twice the storage for about the same price?  There must be something I’m missing.  What makes the My Book For Mac more appealing? 

Below are my specs and what I’d like to do.  

Older IMac (circa 2006) 

OS X 10.5.8

Intel Core 2 Duo

2.16 GHz

L2 Cache 4MB

Memory 3 MB

300G Internal HD with about 77G left open

1 WD External My Book HD – Product ID 0x1100 (Essential ??)

(I currently use the My Book External HD for Time Machine Backup and it works great.  )

What I would like to do is this …

  1. a clean install of Snow Leopard on the IMac then eventually upgrade to Lion. 

  2. use a new External HD to store all media files (IPhoto & ITunes libraries) and access them from there. 

  3. continue to use my current External HD as my Time Machine backup

To add to my confusion, I’ve been reading that there is an issue with My Book for Mac HDs and Lion.  I did see that there was a recent fix released for My Book Live and Lion.  Will the same fix work on the My Book For Mac drive?

I would really appreciate any help or suggestions. 

Thanks,

Kevin

2

KevinS wrote:

I was just at Best Buy where I saw a 1TB My Book For Mac for $100 and a 2TB My Book Essential for $90.  The specs say that the Essential is also compatible with Mac.  Twice the storage for about the same price?  There must be something I’m missing.   What makes the My Book For Mac more appealing?

Nothing at all, it’s just that like everything else that is Mac-ready, it has to be more expensive to comply with Apple’s Elitist marketing approach.

3

you may need to update the mb essential’s firmware also.  but, for the price, you can just reformat it and use it.

4

Thanks for the replies.  I bought the My Book Essential.  2tb for under a hundred dollars!!

5

Smart choice :slight_smile: