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jerryskid

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 5, 2009
10
0
Hey all,
I'm planning on buying a mini and a 500gb or 1 tb external HD +/- upgrading the internal and wondering if I really need to splurge on an external with firewire. I'm planning on using the HD for time machine and to store movies, pics and music. What benefit will I see with the Firewire 800/400...will the increase in speed be noticable???

Cheers
 
I recently bought the Western Digital My Book 1 TB in silver off of Amazon. I decided to spend a little extra in order to get the firewire capabilities because i figure if I'm going to spend a lot of money why not spend a little bit extra to get what I truly want? I have been very happy with it and would gladly recommend it to you or anyone else for that matter. Good luck in choosing, links below to the HD's on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1237515728&sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1237515728&sr=8-1
 
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Firewire will be faster, but USB will likely be fast enough for most needs. Streaming videos from a USB drive, for example, works flawlessly. The only caveats to USB external drives are, in my experience:
1) They mess with sleep. My Mac will not sleep with a USB drive plugged in - every time it tries to sleep, the external spins up and the activity wakes the system.
2) My USB drive goes to sleep more quickly than my Firewire drive. That means if I'm streaming content from the drive and pause it, the drive spins down almost immediately and playing the content again causes it to skip a bit. I don't know whether that's inherent to USB externals, or if its simply my particular drive, though, so YMMV.
 
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