i need an external hard drive for my macbook.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Passport-Portable-Carrying/dp/B000W1OMQK

The WD Passport series is pretty good as far as very portable externals. It is plug and play, the one I linked is 250 gigs, and you can get a much better deal than that elsewhere. The passport series works through USB and is fairly reliable.

If you wanted a more heavy duty external that wouldn't be as susceptible to breaking and if portability isn't an issue for you, then you have many more options.

 

Look at the LaCie Rugged series.

 

I love these too, but circuit city is selling the 500 gig version for 109 or so...

I got mine when they went on sale a while ago for 119. Definitely a nice thing to have.

 

IMO Firewire is the only way to go for Macs. Storage size is increasing every day for the same $$$. Here's one resource and these drives can go both ways:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/400+USB2/

Or you can buy an empty enclosure and put any size/make of drive you want in it.

 

I have owned a couple of LaCie external drives (too busy/lazy to build my own) and they have both performed flawlessly for a couple of years each so far. They regularly get top ratings in the hard drive shootouts in various Mac/computer magazines.

The one thing I've found that's F'ed up is if you move a major Mac application such as iTunes or iPhoto, or any of their support files, or any major Finder folder such as "Music" or "Pictures" onto the external drive it will cause major problems systemwide if you disconnect the external drive, even if you "eject" it properly. I made that mistake, and my laptop is no longer portable. It only works properly with the external drive attached; I'd have to kill a huge number of files in order to regain portability.

 

My friend has a PowerBook. He bought a 2.5”x9.5mm 250Gb Ultra-ATA100 Wester Digital hard drive and installed it into an external HD enclosure (with Firewire/USB ports). He was able to "clone" his internal hard drive to the external one and then physically swap out the drives. He now has the larger drive in his PowerBook.

I did a similar thing for my iMac. I now have a 500Gb internal drive ($109) and a external drive enclosure ($70) with the old hard drive in it.

 

Rocstor.

 

www.slickdeals.net

Check daily, I got a 500GB external Western Digital for 80 bucks on a closeout sale.

 

I was going to put that in, but he beat me to it. My 320 gig external cost me $40. As long as you're patient, you can get some really good deals. Slick deals, if you will.

 

my laCie does the job fine and has fw400+800+USB2 connections

Western digital are also a good make.