Firewire hard drives?

[scamperwillow]

I am shoppoing for a firewire HD - probably a 120 gig one for video editing. any recommendations? I have seen an Iomega, a Fantom, a LaCie - all for around $200 - any experience with these? or recs for other brands.
thanks very much,
Marty

[whocares]

OWC - http://eshop.macsales.com/Static_Pages/index.cfm

Well priced
Fast
Look good
:cool:

[crazzyeddie]

I highly recommend OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com). They have some of the best tech support and products i have ever seen. I have a 120GB Mercury drive (Firewire/USB2.0) and it works great. Fast access times and transfer rates.

The drives are also VERY quiet, because they have no internal fans (the power supply is outside the case). The drives also come loaded with shareware and some cool Apple videos. I would highly recommend them to anyone!

This is the 120GB drive i have: http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=4759&Item=OWCME2FW7120GB

Don't waste your money on getting 8MB of cache in firewire drives... it doesnt help! The one that is linked there is a 2MB drive for $189 (they also have cheap shipping!).

[scamperwillow]

Thanks! for that link. the first time I looked, I was looking at the firewire 800 which costs more. This is a good price. Is there a reason I should think about getting the firewire 800? Am I going to want to add an 800 port? Can I even do that on a iMac 17" flat screen?

[scamperwillow]

So, I decided to buy the OWC 120 gig firewire drive. It has arrived and I just plugged it in - literally just plugged it in - I love it already! It is beautiful, silent and fast.

Question: What is the common wisdom on partitioning hard drives? I am using final cut pro and remember hearing in the past it is good to partition the program in one section and the media in another. Does it really matter? Is it a good thing to do? Is it good to install a system in the drive to use as an alternate start up? any advice much appreciated before I put anything in there.
Thanks!
Marty

[crazzyeddie]

Its fine just to leave it as one big chunk... and installing OS X on it is a good idea. If your main boot drive goes down, Firewire is an excellent backup... plus you can run all the repair tools off of it. Very useful. Glad you're enjoying your purchase.

[scamperwillow]

Thanks Eddie - that's what I'll do. And by the way, you said the drive would be $189 - and that's waht it was the first time I looked. Then I went back a couple days later and it was $179 - I thought hey, I'm not gonna arue with that and bought it!

[whocares]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there any advantages of partitioning a drive, speedwise? I mean if you have OSX and Photoshop's scratch disk on two partitions of the same drive, where's the advantage? They are using the same controller and the same physical disk...

Just keep that baby as one big volume. If you partition it and want to later change them, you have to initalize the whole damn thing!

Installing OS X on the ext. HD is an excellent idea. Maybe try CarbonCopy to copy your system from the internal to the external if you want them to be the same:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13260

[BrandonRP0123]

Just for the record (for anyone who is still reading this thread) the OWC drives are great. If you're the build-it-yourself type - then you can obtain an enclosure and stuff just about any IDE drive out there in it (There's also enclosures that'll let you do Ultra-wide SCSI on the inside, but I haven't seen any myself).

[cr2sh]

Circuit City this week has Western Digital 250GB+8mb harddrives on sale for $84 after rebates.. you can get a generic FW external enclosure for $70... mix and match, a cheap solution.

[ebow]

Originally posted by cr2sh
Circuit City this week has Western Digital 250GB+8mb harddrives on sale for $84 after rebates.. you can get a generic FW external enclosure for $70... mix and match, a cheap solution.

Ooh, tempting... very tempting. Especially since it'd be 8.3 times as much space as I currently have. Do you have a weblink for this, or is it just an in-stores thing? On their website I found the 250 MB WD drive, but no final price info.

[cr2sh]

I decided to start a thread to let others know about this deal... it can be found here.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=47778

The guy who replied to the thread is wrong... this sale is actually going on, I've already bought one.

[scamperwillow]

following a couple suggestions here (plus my own idea...), I am trying to install OSX in my new OWC firewire drive so I can use it to boot in emergencies.

I tried:
1) installing to the drive off my OSX install disk - didn't work.
2) downloaded carbon copy cloner (thanks for the tip) and tried copyijng the system 10 folder over to the hard drive - didn't work.

any suggestions on how to do this? Should this become a separate thread?
Thanks,
MArty

[whocares]

Originally posted by scamperwillow
I tried:
1) installing to the drive off my OSX install disk - didn't work.
2) downloaded carbon copy cloner (thanks for the tip) and tried copyijng the system 10 folder over to the hard drive - didn't work.

For step 1, did you reboot holding down the C button with the install disc in the CD drive? This boots the system from the CD and *not* the internal HD.

[scamperwillow]

Originally posted by whocares
For step 1, did you reboot holding down the C button with the install disc in the CD drive? This boots the system from the CD and *not* the internal HD.

Yes, I did that and selected the hard drive as the install volume and it did its thing and then said the installation was not successful and there was just a little junk in the hard drive.....???

(you know I am not absolutely sure about that since I did so many different things yesterday like run tech tools off the CD - I will double-check)

[daviesaz]

Originally posted by cr2sh
Circuit City this week has Western Digital 250GB+8mb harddrives on sale for $84 after rebates.. you can get a generic FW external enclosure for $70... mix and match, a cheap solution.

I got this hard drive and put it in a BYTECC Firewire enclosure. I can't seem to initialize it with Jaguar. The drive seems OK, because if I set up smaller partitions, the first half of the drive works OK. But I can't get it to recognize the second half of the drive. Any suggestions?

[cr2sh]

Originally posted by daviesaz
I got this hard drive and put it in a BYTECC Firewire enclosure.

I'm not familiar with this enclosure... my first guess is that the chipset in the does not support that large of a capacity.. my plan is to stick it in a FW800 enclosure... check the techs on the enclosure and see, might need a different one.

[crazzyeddie]

Said it was incomplete? Thats very odd... i just installed Panther on my drive yesterday and it worked fine... are you letting it check to installer disk before you install?

Try selecting less options... basically no printer drivers... no languages... no voices... i find that a nice clean OS X install is the best for an emergency backup. If the problem persists, i would try contacting OWC and asking them. They are VERY responsive and love to hear about problems so they can advise everyone and fix the problem.

[whocares]

Originally posted by scamperwillow
Yes, I did that and selected the hard drive as the install volume and it did its thing and then said the installation was not successful and there was just a little junk in the hard drive.....???

Initialize the drive (as an HFS+) and start from scratch would be my advide at this point. Also make sure the drive is bootable: phone OWC. Although I'm sure it is, just make sure.

This sounds weird. I installed several OSs on my external HD, though haven't tried 10.3 yet...