Need Suggestion: Firewire Hard Drive

[jragsdale]

I would like some suggestions on a good firewire hard drive that's portable in the sense that I can throw it in a bag and take it to a Mac lab at my college. I'm looking for something in the 60Gb to 80Gb range and a spindle speed of 7200RPM.

Questions:

1) The Macs at my college are running OS 9 and I run OS 10 at home. Do I need to format the drive for OS 9? Is there a performance or reliability hit by doing so?

2) Do I need to install software on a Mac at my school before I can use the drive? I hoping it will just see it as a "regular" drive without any problems.

3) I'm not sure of the networking configuration at my school but could someone have access to my drive when it's hooked up to the Mac that I'm using at my school's lab?

Thanks for your time.

 

[Longey Nowze]

i would suggest that yo buy a case then put the HD in iti've seen cases from taiwan that are under $40 then you can put any HD you want in it... do you want a 2.5" or 3.5"? 2.5" usually take their power from firewire cable 3.5"
need to be plugged in, if you dont want to make your own then check out http://www.lacie.com they are good and you can find good deals on older models.

to answer you other Qs:
1. I dont think it needs anything special, i remember there was an option to install OS 9 drivers when you format it but i dont think you need them.

2) no

3) i dont think so.

 

[ibookin']

Originally posted by Longey Nowze
i remember there was an option to install OS 9 drivers when you format it but i dont think you need them.

I say install the OS 9 drivers. Fancy formatting your drive, putting data on it, then having to reformat it when you find out that it won't work with OS 9?

I didn't think so.

 

[patrick0brien]

-jragsdale

I use this OWC Mercury FireWire drive for portable Final Cut editing, and it is read for both OS X and OS 9 out of box. Also it's 6-pin Firewire so it doesn't really need external power. True Plug-and-play.

You'll notice that it's spindle speed is 5400RPM. It has a 16mb cache to mitigate this - I did say I use it for FCP editing on the road

This Mercury is special as it has the faster spindle speed and the 16mb cache. Other ChiFCPug'gers use this drive.

If you have the coin, I couldn't recommend anything better.