I'm going to buy a drive to use with time machine soon. In the past I've had Lacie and Western Digital. I see the Apple Time Capsules are a lot more expensive. Is there any real benefit for getting the Apple brand apart from the wireless facility? Can anyone recommend one they've bought recently? I've been looking at USB or Thunderbolt, 2 or 3TB.

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Thanks

Carolyn

We've had Western Digital (WD) drives at work - no problems in the last 4 years. Just their basic "Elements" range, with USB 2.

If your Mac has USB 3, it may be worth looking out for those models that support it over USB 2.0 - I'd give Thunderbolt a miss unless you have money to burn, they're pretty expensive and unless you're chucking huge files to it, USB 2/3 will be fine for Time Machine backups I would have thought.

At home, in the past I've used a mixture of WD (Elements, USB 2), Hitachi (G-Drive for Mac, Firewire 800), LaCie (Porsche, Firewire 400) and Verbatim (Store 'n' Go for Mac, USB 3.0) - none of these have had any issues in the last 7 or 8 years.

For what it's worth.

I have a Time capsule, with 2Tb of storage. While it is more expensive it comes with b/g/n wifi and you can set up a guest wifi network which is very handy if you have guests and can set up an easier wifi password for them without having to compromise your own network. Also it makes it easy to keep an eye on with the iPhone app Airport Utility.

Big fan of the WD Elements in terms of bang per buck. Use them at work where they're shunted about with shallow regard, and we've not had one go wrong in a couple of years. So I'm running 2 at home, one for Time Machine purposes.
I'm using the iPhone bumper frame doodad to separate them just to keep some air flow between them, just to help a lil bit.

+1 on the WD Elements. Excellent value for money and as the prof says, they don't have a fan, or if they do, its whisper quiet.

+1 to WD drives.

Do they (WD Elements drives) have a physical off switch?

No, but they detect when the other end of the USB connection is, and hibernate.
I just switch everything off at the wall when I go out.

+1 to that. Saves faffing about looking for switches.

Call me old fashioned but I like to know I can definitely switch a drive off (without going for the wall socket).
Had a Seagate drive that was meant to power down when the computer was off and its behaviour was, at best, erratic.

You could always get one of those multi sockets that have a main device in one key socket and when that is no longer active it cuts the power to the other sockets. I think Belkin do something like that,

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003WK62XO/? ... B003WK62XO

http://www.overclock.co.uk/product/Belk ... 25872.html

@Davros.
I take your point. When it first arrived I was dismayed to discover that there was no switch. However, the hibernation function does work.
Although not pretty, I have arranged the 6 way fly lead to hang on the wall behind my desk and all the sockets are individually switched.

I hate turning off things like a disk drive with a switch on the unit, when the thing is supplied by a mains adaptor which remains powered on...

USB power-down should be both 100% as efficient and more dependable than a mechanical switch.

I went for the WD Elements 2TB. That should do us for a while.