which external hardrive to buy??

[BEET]

Hi guys,

I need a little advice/opinions on buying an external hardrive for my power book. What capacity, brand etc..
I'd like to spend no more than about £100 and would like a small, with lots of capacity, mac and pc compatible good looking hardrive mainly for backing up my itunes library, movies etc...


any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
cheers, BEET

 

[JLS]

Hi guys,

I need a little advice/opinions on buying an external hardrive for my power book. What capacity, brand etc..
I'd like to spend no more than about £100 and would like a small, with lots of capacity, mac and pc compatible good looking hardrive mainly for backing up my itunes library, movies etc...


any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
cheers, BEET

http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/products.asp?action=showproduct&id=24&q=&type=29

Thats a pretty good one, and I have bought stuff from these people before - very good service.

 

[kettle]

For future use I'd go for a SATA design.

Then you can still be using it in 10+ years time, swapping out your G5 hard drives for bigger ones. You could use the old ones in the external box.

just a thought.

 

[Coolvirus007]

I have lacie and OWC external hard drives. They are both great. Check if they have any that are under 100quid.

 

[wdlove]

I have lacie and OWC external hard drives. They are both great. Check if they have any that are under 100quid.

I have the OWC Mercury Elite. Have had it since MWNY 2002. Recommend it highly.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Static_Pages/index.cfm

 

[Peyote]

Last I checked their site recently, LaCie was offering their 20gb drives on their clearance page for $119...a pretty darn good price for a brand new LaCie drive.

 

[BEET]

Thanks for the replies. I've had a look on a few websites and have decided that I'm probably gonna go for a Lacie 250GB at around £130.

I'm pretty sure that my powerbook doesn't have USB2, although when I used my friend's USB2 Lacie drive it seemed to work well and pretty quickly. Does this mean that I should get the USB2 or the Firewire hardrive??

 

[Peyote]

Thanks for the replies. I've had a look on a few websites and have decided that I'm probably gonna go for a Lacie 250GB at around £130.

I'm pretty sure that my powerbook doesn't have USB2, although when I used my friend's USB2 Lacie drive it seemed to work well and pretty quickly. Does this mean that I should get the USB2 or the Firewire hardrive??

I would get Firewire...faster is better.

 

[Manzana]

I would get Firewire...faster is better.

so is firewire faster than usb2?

 

[macidiot]

so is firewire faster than usb2?

Yes. USB is theoretically 480mbit/s vs 400 for firewire. However since usb is similar to ide, its a burst thing. Firewire 400 is faster across the board. If your doing something that requires sustained throughput, like video streaming, firewire is definitely better.

Of course FW800 is even faster.

 

[Peyote]

Yes. USB is theoretically 480mbit/s vs 400 for firewire. However since usb is similar to ide, its a burst thing. Firewire 400 is faster across the board. If your doing something that requires sustained throughput, like video streaming, firewire is definitely better.

Of course FW800 is even faster.

I as under the impression that USB2 is 480mbit/sec, and FW is 400 MB/sec...is that incorrect? If this is true, then FW 400 is around 8 times faster than USB 2

 

[macidiot]

I as under the impression that USB2 is 480mbit/sec, and FW is 400 MB/sec...is that incorrect? If this is true, then FW 400 is around 8 times faster than USB 2

Firewire is also rated in mbit/sec. 400MB/s is crazy fast. That would let you fill your ipod in ~10 seconds. For example, the ata/100 spec is 800mbit/sec. That's what your getting for your internal hard drives.

Put another way, usb2 is rated at 4.8MB/s and firewire is 4MB/s. They probably just use megabits because it sounds bigger. Then again, since firewire could in theory be used to create a p2p network of macs, it could be to compare to other networking protocols.

Oh, fyi, the nomenclature is supposed to be Mb=megabit and MB=megabyte. Capitals are supposed to mean the difference between bits and bytes. But people almost never get that part right, including myself, so its easy to get confused.

The main difference is that firewire does sustained throughput much better than usb. Also, the overhead of usb2 is much lower than firewire. Usb was originally designed to be a replacement for serial. Firewire was designed to be a replacement for scsi. Things like sustained throughput, easy daisy chaining, lots of devices, length of daisy chain, were all key features of firewire. Dealing with scsi addressing...what a nightmare.

 

[Penman]

Firewire is also rated in mbit/sec. 400MB/s is crazy fast. That would let you fill your ipod in ~10 seconds. For example, the ata/100 spec is 800mbit/sec. That's what your getting for your internal hard drives.

Put another way, usb2 is rated at 4.8MB/s and firewire is 4MB/s. They probably just use megabits because it sounds bigger. Then again, since firewire could in theory be used to create a p2p network of macs, it could be to compare to other networking protocols.

Oh, fyi, the nomenclature is supposed to be Mb=megabit and MB=megabyte. Capitals are supposed to mean the difference between bits and bytes. But people almost never get that part right, including myself, so its easy to get confused.

The main difference is that firewire does sustained throughput much better than usb. Also, the overhead of usb2 is much lower than firewire. Usb was originally designed to be a replacement for serial. Firewire was designed to be a replacement for scsi. Things like sustained throughput, easy daisy chaining, lots of devices, length of daisy chain, were all key features of firewire. Dealing with scsi addressing...what a nightmare.

You're right in principle but not in fact. Megabits are eight times larger than Megabytes. E.g. 8 Mb/s is 1 MB/s. Your quote suggests it's a factor of 10 which isn't correct.

The comment on the marketing is ont he money though - it sounds bigger. I remember when they started selling Nintendo cartridges on the basis of the games being "8 Megabits!" It dawned on me then it was just pure marketing (at a time when people thought that a Megabit and a Megabyte were the same thing). I wish Apple wouldn't do it though. It's like pricing items in pennies - redundant and stupid.