External Hard Drives for Macintosh?

The Maxtor external drives are a great choice, but if you want it to work on both platforms (mac & PC) you need to format it as a windows NTFS+ drive (use disk utility). The Mac will read windows disks without any problems but windows PC's aren't so flexible when it comes to mac formatted disks. The Western digital drives are cheaper but I've had more people come to me with issues on the WD drives than on the Maxtor ones. LaCie drives aren't a great option right now either, their firmware seems to have issues with OS 10.5 I'm hoping for a patch soon but until then I've got to recommend the Maxtor over the other two.

A friend of mine had trouble finding a mac compatible external drive, but I have had very very good luck with any of the simple-tech external drives. Yes make sure they are USB 2.0, any thing slower would be ridiculously slow, and almost unusable. I checked out a few firewire drives since they are crazy fast, but they are too pricey, and these work fine, and work right out of the box. Now what nobody else asked but I will is if you have an intel mac, and what OS you are using. I you are using Leopard you will have no problems whatsoever, if you are using Tiger usually ok too, but if you are suing Panther, you probably only have a USB 1.1 bus, and even if you get a 2.0 external drive it will be dead dog slow. If you have an older powerpc running jaguar or even Panther, you will need to get a firewire drive, cause like I said before USB 1.1 is too slow. So lets over over this one more time: If you have an intel mac, and USB 2.0 go with the simple-tech external drive, I own 3 500 gig drives, and they have been fabulous. If you have Mac OS Leopard, or Tiger and USB 2.0, the simple-tech drives should be fine. If you only have a Power-PC, and are using Panther or Jaguar, you should get a firewire drive, since USB will be too slow for you. Lastly, if you want to use the simple tech drives with time machine you must reformat them for the mac, and make sure to change the master boot record(MBR) so time machine will see the drive as an available backup drive otherwise time machine will not run. Good Luck!

I know western digital has some good prices for the storage space but when you connect to one OS its hard for the other to read the stuff on the external hard drive. I am not sure if things changed but thats just my experience.

western digital make really good external hard drives, they have large storage capacities, very reliable, are compatible with windows and mac and have cool features (like switch on and off when connected - or computer on/off- and show you their capacity stats. from external leds.). the only problem is that they can be a little pricey.

radioshack.com has a Maxtor 160GB hardive for 40 bucks.