It’s a bad time to invest in a portable USB hard drive as a Mac fan. Apple’s dropped Firewire support on many of their notebooks, but have yet to adopt the USB 3.0 standard, leaving Apple customers stuck using aging and slow USB 2.0 hardware.
If you’re looking for a new hard drive, then, it’s easy to recommend Seagate’s new FreeAgent GoFlex line which can connect to most interfaces, including USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA.
Buy one of these drives and you can use USB 2.0 or Firewire for now, then upgrade to USB 3.0 read/write speeds when Apple finally starts installing the hardware in their Macs. The FlexGo line even comes with an interesting NTFS driver specifically for Mac users, which allows it to be used as a Windows-formatted NTFS drive in OS X without reformatting it.
Not bad, but the trade-off here is the somewhat high price of the drives. The 5400RPM drives come in capacities of 320GB ($99.99), 500GB ($139.99), 750GB ($179.99), and 1TB ($229), while the 7200rpm drives comes in at 500GB ($159.99) and 750GB ($199.99).
