Some customers prefer to have an external hard drive for backups. This is fine with us. It is very useful for members of the HotStandby Club. A bootable cloned hard drive can be attached to the new Mac mini and booted from, resulting in very low downtime. The hard drive should be BUS powered and can be USB or Firewire. (As these are the options available on the Mac mini.) The cost is $10/mo for the power and space taken by the drive.

We've had great results with the Western Digital portable hard drives. They come with USB or Firewire and up to 1TB in space. They can be found here. (If you order the drive we provide on our signup page, you will receive the WD brand.)

You're also welcome to send in a drive of your own to be attached. This is a great way to get that initial loading of data to your Mac mini.