[gth654r]

There are a lot of them out there so I thought I'd ask for some help narrowing it down.

I have two laptops--an IBM Thinkpad R40 running Windows XP (40 GB HD) and a new Mac 16" PowerBook with OSX (80GB HD). The Thinkpad is on its last leg and the Mac is my primary computer now. I want to use an external hard drive to back up all my files on my old computer and important things/music on my new computer.

So, I'm looking for an external hard drive that's Windows and PC compatible, and has at least USB 2.0 (that's what my Thinkpad has, although I thought it was just USB 1.1 because it always tells me "your device could perform faster with USB 2.0" even when it IS 2.0), and it would be cool to have FireWire (for my Mac).

I'm thinking either 40GB or 80GB (to be on the safe side). I probably won't back up all of my 35 or so GB from my Thinkpad, and for now, I only have about 7GB of files on my Mac. I must confess though that I don't know too much about external hard drives...do people generally store their whole hard drives? Or just files?

Any help would be much appreciated

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Well any of them from seagate, maxtor, western digital, samsung etc. would be more than fine, it is easier to find them at between 120-200 Gb in size as those drives are the best value for money, i would say as long as it has USB 2.0(faster than firewire contrary to some backwards beliefs) it will be fine.

[warriorscot]

Well any of them from seagate, maxtor, western digital, samsung etc. would be more than fine, it is easier to find them at between 120-200 Gb in size as those drives are the best value for money, i would say as long as it has USB 2.0(faster than firewire contrary to some backwards beliefs) it will be fine.

[Thebinaryman]

look for 7200rpm, and with at least 8mb buffer.

also, it may be cheaper to buy a internal hard drive, and put it in a external case. but maybe not.