Ethernet External Harddrive ?

[fab5freddy]

i just saw this Western Digital 1 TB harddrive.
I has an Ethernet connection.....

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=340

does anyone know if that is quicker that Firewire 800 ?
that would give you amazing speed if you could hook up an Ethernet HD
to your Mac.....not ?

 

[janey]

how is this new in any way?

it would depend on the connection specifics and what you'd be doing. but a nas would be infinitely more useful than local fw800 connected storage if you have a bunch of computers to share the data with.

 

[theBB]

Gigabit Ethernet vs. FW800 speeds may end up being quite close, but a lot of NAS drives are just 100MB/s ethernet. I'd check the speed on this one.

You can have your Firewire drive set to be shared, but this requires your computer to be turned on for others to have a connection to it.

 

[fab5freddy]

i wasn't really interested in sharing or networking, more just the connection speed to my own MacBook Pro with the ethernet connection....
By the way, what is NAS ?

 

[itickings]

i wasn't really interested in sharing or networking, more just the connection speed to my own MacBook Pro with the ethernet connection....
By the way, what is NAS ?

NAS is short for "Network Attached Storage".

If you're not interested in sharing, go for FW800. It has the potential to be way faster, allows you to run a file system of your choice, easily run disk verifications and repairs etc.

Network transfers require a network protocol, which itself needs bandwidth, and eats processor cycles on both ends. In general, consumer level units have tiny CPUs which can't process data fast enough.

Try searching the web for reviews, and you'll find people complaining about the speed. For speed, I'd rather use a FW400 drive than a networked drive...

 

[MacDonaldsd]

If your plugging it in to your mac directly, then firewire is the way to go.