iPod iPod speed as a HDD

Um, it's USB 2.0, so it will be much slower.

Edit: Never mind, I skimmed your post.

The iPod should be a lot slower...

1) It's only 4200 RPM

2) It's only 1.8" diameter, so it's also reading less circumference on each of those revoutions.

3) It's ATA66, and I don't think it has a very large cache.

4) The aforementioned USB issue, if getting the external drive in FW is at all possible... USB is much slower than firewire at sustained transfers. When you transfer a filesize of 500MB, there may be a factor of two or more difference in time between FW400 and USB2. It's substantial enough that initial loading of a USB iPod is surprisingly slow having come from a Firewire iPod of several years ago.

So all in all, slow.

But just to play devil's advocate, if you're transferring around 500MB, an external drive of any kind is a lot of bother. Why not a $20 USB flash drive? It's very slow also, but... much simpler. No cables, etc. Or do you mean that you have many gigabytes of 500MB files you need to transfer?

offwidafairies said:

I'm transferring multiple files of around 500Mb... Im a tutor and have 60 500Mb assignments to mark in Pro Tools, hence needing to read off a HDD rather than CD

Click to expand...

There would be a large overall difference between 30 gigs in that fashion over Firewire to a fast 2.5" drive and over USB to an iPod... if I shot out guesses, I'd guess it would take about 10-15 minutes or even less to transfer that to the external drive and 30-40 for the iPod.

offwidafairies said:

I'm transferring multiple files of around 500Mb... Im a tutor and have 60 500Mb assignments to mark in Pro Tools, hence needing to read off a HDD rather than CD

Click to expand...

You don't want to read protools projects off your ipod. I'm not even sure it would let you. Get a solid FW external drive and a case for it.