About a year and a half ago, I purchased a Western Digital Drive for Time Machine to run as a backup solution while I was at work. About two weeks ago, the drive stopped mounting on my MacBook Pro. I waited it out, tried using Disk Utilities, powered it down for hours and even took the hard drive out. In fact, I took the hard drive out and put it in a desktop and it wouldn't show up. I tried reformatting, no go.
So I decided to purchase a new drive, since this one is dead. The old drive is out of warranty, being over a year. So I decided to not go with Western Digital and went with a Fantom Drive. There is currently a $20 rebate for the drive at certain vendors and NewEgg.com had a $10 instant rebate as well. So I purchased the 1TB drive, which is twice as large as the other drive.
I do hope to partition the drive so that 50% would be used for Time Machine and 50% would be used for video storage. I currently use a Western Digital portable drive for storing my videos, but I rather use a desktop unit, if possible.
Pretty sad I am losing my time machine backups with the WD drive. But I only used Time Machine once or twice in 1.5 years and even then, it wasn't a do or die use of Time Machine.
Keep in mind, I still use Super Duper for bootable cloned backups and that is still working.


Comments
You should take a look at online backup solutions. I made the switch and I've never looked at my portable again. $5 a month for unlimited from as many computer as you want? That's free as far as I'm concerned.
Posted by: Olivier Amar | June 1, 2009 4:35 PM
I do online backups as well for some files, but Time Machine and clone backups on physical drives are awesome to have.
Posted by: Barry Schwartz | June 1, 2009 4:37 PM
I've had problems mounting all the partitions with my 2 Fantom drives when I plug them in. Sometimes additional partitions do NOT show up.
FYI, the Fantom Drives are actually Western Digital drives also (atleast mine are since I opened them up to take a peek inside).
Just thought you'd like to know.
Posted by: Visitor | June 8, 2009 7:10 PM