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Which Firewire 800 drive for Al iMac?

mbalson

mbalson

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 16, 2007
56
0
Toronto, Ontario
Hi all,
I'm looking for some opinions and suggestions on buying an external hard drive to match the new iMac. For me it needs to be Firewire 800, 500GB and pretty.
Also, I am in Canada and would prefer to have it ship from within the country.

I like the look of these two, preferring the Iomega:
Iomega 500GB Ultramax HD E-SATA/USB/FireWire 400 & 800

Western Digital 500 GB My Book Studio Edition

Are there quality issues with the Iomega? It looks amazing and has everything I want specs wise. Thanks in advance!

Edit: I suppose there is also this one, though it's not FW800 and can it be placed on it's side?:
LaCie 301103U F.A. Porsche 500 GB USB 2.0

or the Fantom G-Force 500GB, are Fantom drives any good?
 
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I have the previous generation of FW800 500GB MyBook, and it's an excellent drive - quiet, fast, and faaaaaast. I have also heard Fantom is outstanding.

Avoid LaCie at all costs.
 
I recently bought a Lacie 1TB d2 Quadra drive and it's been working very well. You here good and bad about all makers of storage it seems.
 
I also like the iomega one. I wish they'd do a FW800 version of their Minimax though. Some of us iMac owners bought them because they stack so well next to the iMac stand. Nice form factor and with a USB hub built in. Why should mini owners have them all to themselves?
 
I have two G-Tech FW 800 drives and an OWC mercury elite HD with FW400. The build quality on all three is very good. The G-Drives from my research are consistently reliable, so I would go with those.
 
Thanks for your feedback. It seems everyone have their favorites. I think I am going to try and hunt down the Iomega or Fantom ones. They just look so good.
 
I have 2 Iomega ultramax's, 1 is 640gb and the other 1TB.

Very happy with them although speed wasn't up to par as I expected with a FW800 connection. However this morning I was messing with the connections on the back as it has both USB2 and a built in USB2 hub and also FW800 connection.
Now heres me thinking that as I have both USB and FW800 connected to the drive that the Mac would use the fastest FW800 and then just use USB2 for the built in hub, oh how wrong was I lol :)
I did some transfer tests and even though I had both connected it was using the slower USB2 connection! Needless to say I have now removed USB and use a separate USB hub.

Now I am even happier with the drives due to the speed BUT IMHO the fan noise from these drives can be annoying to me so if I was to recommend a drive try to look for a fan-less FW800 drive if noise is an issue.

I have pc boxes kicking around here so I am going to stick a load of hard drives inside one and use it as a gigabit server.
 
Well, I went with the "Iomega 500GB Ultramax HD E-SATA/USB/FireWire 400 & 800" purely for looks and on paper specs. It does look great and everything about it seems fine except it's easily the loudest HD I've ever heard. The read/write sounds are insane.
 
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