Should I get a Backup Drive??

[aussie_geek]

My PowerBook is starting to get a bit cramped. With only 30 Gb left out of a 80 GB hd after buying the PowerBook in May do you think that it would be time to expand my storage facilities.

I like to play around with music so there are a couple of thousand loops on there - and the collection is growing. So, what I was planning to do is put all of the music stuff on a firewire hd so that it would clear up some space on here.

I was thinking of getting an Ice Cube 2 - 160 Gb, 400Mbps firewire 1. Should I spend more money and get the 800 Mbps firewire 2 or will the
'400 be sufficient?


aussie_geek

 

[live4ever]

Yes (fw400 should be sufficient - for what you say).

 

[mrgreen4242]

If you are planning on leaving the external drive at home, and keeping the things you need on the internal harddrive you may want to consider getting an external firewire enclosure for IDE drives.

Get one that can hold 2 or 3 or more drives, and then you can add either harddrives as you need more space, or add a DVD burner (if you don't have one - if you do a faster one or a dual layer as they become availble, or a simple DVD-ROM drive to do disc to disc copies).

Will probably save you some money in the end, and add some upgradability to a system that is not very upgradable.

 

[Counterfit]

"only" 30GB left? I haven't had that much in quite some time 😉
As for what kind of drive, I have a pair of OWC Mercury "Pro Elite" drives, with Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. It seems that the case (and probably the chipset) is the same as the Ice Cube enclosure you're looking at (with FW800 instead of USB 2 though). Firewire is ****ING FAST! Although, they're a little more expensive than the non-800 drives, I think it's worth it.

And if this is where you were looking to get your drive, don't 😛, that's not a very good price. And then there's this...

This is a very Professional, Stylish Ice Cube Design with Aluminum Housing case, not a cheap plastic case!

I didn't know aluminum was transparent... 🙄

 

[maya]

"only" 30GB left? I haven't had that much in quite some time 😉
As for what kind of drive, I have a pair of OWC Mercury "Pro Elite" drives, with Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. It seems that the case (and probably the chipset) is the same as the Ice Cube enclosure you're looking at (with FW800 instead of USB 2 though). Firewire is ****ING FAST! Although, they're a little more expensive than the non-800 drives, I think it's worth it.

And if this is where you were looking to get your drive, don't 😛, that's not a very good price. And then there's this... I didn't know aluminum was transparent... 🙄

Maybe they are using some sort of space age Al that is clear, when will Apple get this new material. 😉 🙂

 

[aussie_geek]

Beam Me up Scotty!

Maybe they are using some sort of space age Al that is clear, when will Apple get this new material. 😉 🙂

Hmmm...

Maybe Steve Jobs is having discussions with Scotty out of Star Trek.

Here - look... Scotty is formulating Transparent Aluminum on his Mac Plus! (Star Trek IV The Voyage Home) 😛

aussie_geek

 

[mkrishnan]

What does everyone think of a network drive hooked up to one's AEBS or whatever, as opposed to a FW drive? I'm kinda wondering if I should get one one of these days... It might be nice to backup TV shows I want to keep from ReplayTV too... But then I also wonder if there's a way to use the Replay as a network drive, in which case it would be better to just get a bigger drive for it.

But anyway, unless you plan on carrying it around, the network drive would be nice in that you wouldn't have to plug it in to use it. You'd just have to be in the building. 😎

 

[crazzyeddie]

Networks drives are much much much much slower than a local drive, even if connected by CAT5 to your network. Wireless will be much slower than wired too, pushing you down to 54mbps, where as Firewire is 400mbps.

 

[mkrishnan]

Networks drives are much much much much slower than a local drive, even if connected by CAT5 to your network. Wireless will be much slower than wired too, pushing you down to 54mbps, where as Firewire is 400mbps.

This is true...I guess it depends on what you put on it...if you put MP3s on it, I don't think 54 vs. 400 will make a lot of difference, but I could see it wouldn't exactly make a good video scratch drive. 🙁

 

[aussie_geek]

Networks drives are much much much much slower than a local drive, even if connected by CAT5 to your network. Wireless will be much slower than wired too, pushing you down to 54mbps, where as Firewire is 400mbps.

Isn't it possible to hook up a network drive to a gigabit ethernet interface (like on my G4) - that is tbase 1000 (1Gbit) It would only be good for the computer that is connected to it though.


aussie_geek