I am wondering what the best hard drive would be for TM on my new iMac. It needs to be Firewire, be at least 300 GB, be quiet, and be fast. I would also like it to be fairly cheap. Thanks in advance!
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External Hard Drive for TM
- Thread starter MegaMan1311
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I built a drive for similar purposes, rather than buying a complete kit. I found a Firewire enclosure, a 750GB drive and I was done. Total outlay for 750GB was around $200 at the time. You could get a much much cheaper HDD if you only need 3-500GB.
Well its not FW but I have the WD Elements 320GB USB hard drive (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=326&language=en) and its wonderful. Oh, and cheap 
298GB when formatted to NTFS (not sure about HFS+) but good enough
Highly recomended
298GB when formatted to NTFS (not sure about HFS+) but good enough
Highly recomended
I guess I should mention that I have a lot of video and large files. Would Firewire not be better than USB for that?
Technically speaking, unless you have a FW800 port, and get a FW800 drive, you shouldn't see a difference. FW400 = USB2.0 (basically) when it comes to throughput.
Sorry, but this is plain wrong. Firewire 400 has much greater throughput than USB2. Sure the USB2 spec is higher than Firewire but any disk transfer test will show Firewire is significantly superior. Here's an extract from a real world test
Quote
FireWire vs. USB 2.0 Hard Drive Performance Comparison
Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:
Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0
Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0