About External iBook Hard Drives

The Apple iBook was the name of a variety of Apple laptops for the consumer market that first featured a brightly colored "clamshell" design and later changed to a snow white look. Since they were not considered pro-level computers, their internal hard drive capacity often was small for what consumers wanted to use them for, such as photos and music. That's where external hard drives come in.

History

From the beginning, iBooks had Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports that makes it easy to attach USB hard drives. There are two kinds of these hard drives: desktop and portable. The desktop variety has its own power source and, as the name implies, stays on the desktop. Portable hard drives are much smaller, both physically and capacity-wise, but are light for transporting.

Types

Early iBooks had the slower USB 1 ports that transfer data at 1.5 megabytes per second or 12mps. Later models have one or two USB 2.0 ports that transfer data at 480mps. This is important, depending on how you use your external hard drive. The slow speed could make it difficult for big projects or movie watching.

Features

Companies such as LaCie, Western Digital and Seagate make external, portable hard drives for the iBook. These generally will get power from the USB cable without a need for another power source. This allows the iBook and external unit on the road or in planes.

Considerations

Desktop externals for the iBook are the same as for a desktop computer. They connect with the USB cable or, on some models, the faster, better Firewire cable. Firewire also allows you to daisy-chain a number of external hard drives to one port on the iBook.

Size

External hard drives for the iBook can range in capacity from approximately 50 gigabytes for portable units up to a couple of terabytes for the desktop variety.

Resources

• Mac iBook