Buying another Seagate FreeAgent HD: USB okay?

[Christopher11]

I have a 500GB FreeAgent external HD with FireWire. I love it; it's been great.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...&cm_mmc_o=TBBTkwCjCVyBpAgf mwzygtCjCVRqCjCVRq

I'm thinking of buying another. I notice the USB one, without the FireWire option is significantly cheaper. Isn't FireWire better though? More reliable? Would you use USB for this purpose?

Thanks so much for any replies.

 

[miles01110]

Reliability of a hard drive doesn't depend on the bus, it depends on the drive. The USB model will be fine for pretty much anything you throw at it, the exceptions being if you had to read and write large files to/from your drive frequently.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

Would you use USB for this purpose?

What purpose? Backups? iTunes? ??something else???

I have a 500MB USB Seagate Freeagent running fine on my iMac, its still NTFS format so its read only, and its full of the files off my PC which will stay there until I have finished xferring them up to Amazon's backup service when I will reformat it.
I have an older 250Mb USB connected HD (mac formatted) which is where I have my downloads directed to. No issues with that.
I have another Toshiba 1Tb USB HD (mac formatted also) which I use just for Time Machine, no problems. I considered getting a firewire HD instead but didnt think the extra cost was justified.

Maybe if I was editing large video files off any of these discs I would need Firewire, but for general use, I dont. What are you planning to do with your HD?

 

[techound1]

As everyone alluded to, FW is faster. eSATA is becoming the new bus in the PC world, but has yet to come to macs in force. That is why you are seeing the USB drives at a great price.

 

[michael.lauden]

As everyone alluded to, FW is faster. eSATA is becoming the new bus in the PC world, but has yet to come to macs in force. That is why you are seeing the USB drives at a great price.

yep and first hand, the 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme is a piece of crap. firewire barely works. you can find this to be true all over the internet with no real solution. i returned mine after 2 days of trying this morning

 

[Christopher11]

Sorry guys, yes, should have stated: i'm using it for backing up my hard drive on my macbook. I use SuperDuper. Nothing intensive really, not running it with video or audio or any kind of application. I just open SuperDuper, tell it to backup and walk away. It sounds like you guys feel USB is fine for this.

I don't even care about speed, but for accuracy in data transfer for this application it sounds like you're saying USB is about as reliable as FW.

Thanks again.

 

[miles01110]

Yes, USB is definitely fine. Transfer rates with backup software are almost always limited by how fast the program can index the files, not how fast it can transfer them.