External (firewire) advice requested!

[Acymetric]

I'm looking to get an external firewire drive, and I was hoping to get some input from anyone here who has experience/knowledge about them. I've looked into it and found a few that looked good to me, but I wanted to get someone else's opinion since its a pretty expensive investment (for a college student). I would prefer bus powered unless someone knows a good reason why thats a bad idea, and I want 7200rpm, as opposed to 5400.

Here are some that I'm looking at:

G-Drive Mini (http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-mini.cfm)

G-Drive (http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm)

LaCie (http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11135)

[hc5duke]

i don't like bus powered devices unless it's flash based - just from my experience a lot can go wrong when you mix moving parts with unreliable power source. what's the capacity range you're looking for - looks like 200gb-500gb range? newegg.com is where i normally go first for this type of thing, then amazon.

g-drive doesn't seem to have good reviews on amazon - i'd stay away from it but that's just my gut feeling.

this lacie is 250gb for $94 on amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VW2QRM/sr=8-1/qid=1262815797/ref=noref?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262815797&sr=8-1) - that seems like a good price for what you're looking for.

also, is there a reason you want firewire? usb is more standard, especially if you want to plug it into another computer to transfer files.

[Acymetric]

i don't like bus powered devices unless it's flash based - just from my experience a lot can go wrong when you mix moving parts with unreliable power source. what's the capacity range you're looking for - looks like 200gb-500gb range? newegg.com is where i normally go first for this type of thing, then amazon.

g-drive doesn't seem to have good reviews on amazon - i'd stay away from it but that's just my gut feeling.

this lacie is 250gb for $94 on amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VW2QRM/sr=8-1/qid=1262815797/ref=noref?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262815797&sr=8-1) - that seems like a good price for what you're looking for.

also, is there a reason you want firewire? usb is more standard, especially if you want to plug it into another computer to transfer files.

Well the reason I would prefer bus powered is that I'm going to be moving between a lot of different computers, and some of them may not have an open outlet nearby, but I could probably work around that if its a big concern.

200-500 is about right, I would love to get more but I only have so much money to throw at this and by the time I need much more than that I'll probably have a little more money too.

The reason I want firewire is that I'm working with audio and video editing, so the faster speed is important for larger projects (high quality audio with more than a few tracks and such). Most firewire devices I've looked at also seem to have all 3 of firewire 400, 800, and USB, so I would be able to transfer files to a computer with usb if I needed too. Most computers I'll be working with should have firewire as well, so on the off chance the drive doesn't have usb it shouldn't be a huge problem. Thanks for the input.

[onepresent]

I have this type of case with a 5400 rpm drive and it works well.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

The optional power supply is only $8, giving you the choice of bus powered or external source. I also own this, but rarely take the extra time to plug in the power adapter.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MOTGPWR/

[moonpie23]

i have about 10 of the Lacie "porsche" design firewire drives varying in capacity and i would highly recommend them......very easy to use and i have not had ONE go down in 10 years due to hardware issues..

very reliable...

[burnspbesq]

I have a deceased G-Drive Mini. Just stopped working without any warning.

Most smaller-capacity external drives are USB. I have had good luck with everything I've ever bought from Western Digital.

[Reisen]

Forget Firewire, the technology is already obsolete. Go eSata. Or wait for the new USB standard.

[moonpie23]

it might be obsolete, but firewire 800 is a hauling butt way to transfer stuff to a back up drive.

[hc5duke]

it might be obsolete, but firewire 800 is a hauling butt way to transfer stuff to a back up drive.

pretty sure eSATA is faster than either firewire800 or usb, but you're not going to find any laptops (do people still buy desktops?) that takes it

[moonpie23]

it just depends on what you're using the drive for....if you're working ON the drive, depending on your software and speed demands, definitely go for the fastest you can get.

for simple storage, firewire 800 is plenty fast...

[moonpie23]

there are some eSATA connectors out there for laptops.

www.merax.com


little over $100 but if you're planning on working ON the external drive, this would give you the autobahn...



edit....actually found even more on compusa.com less expensive too

[Reisen]

Firewire, even Firewire 800, is a pretty old standard. eSata can be, I believe, either 1500, or 3000. So you're talking approximately 2-4x the speed. In real world tests, I believe it's even faster.

I just went this route a few months ago, and there were some pretty good options for external drives with eSata. If you're using a notebook, you can get eSata expansion cards, although this probably slows it down somewhat, as it has to go over the cardbus.

I do all my video editing on a high-end desktop (Win7 Pro x64, Core i7, copius amounts of ram, Intel SSD), and use eSata for my scratch drive (Sony Vegas Pro to edit AVCHD).

[fuse]

This may not suit your needs, but unless you feel compelled to have a physical external drive in hand, you should consider a network backup utility.

One of the popular ones is Mozy, and you can mine a ton of information by googling "network backup review" "cloud backup review".

I think Mozy is <$50/year for a subscription with unlimited backup capacity. Hard to beat that.

[Acymetric]

Just an update, I went with the LaCie bus powered device. Thanks for the input from everybody, but since I don't have eSata on my laptop that wasn't an option, plus this was fairly inexpensive. I didn't have a lot of time to wait before I picked one up so things like getting an eSata card for my laptop wouldn't really have been feasible.

[hc5duke]

This may not suit your needs, but unless you feel compelled to have a physical external drive in hand, you should consider a network backup utility.

One of the popular ones is Mozy, and you can mine a ton of information by googling "network backup review" "cloud backup review".

I think Mozy is <$50/year for a subscription with unlimited backup capacity. Hard to beat that.

network = slow

[fuse]

network = slow

Perhaps the initial backup would take some time but any incremental changes would be fast enough.

The network is your friend :-)

A network backup service also offers resiliency where a single non-RAID hard drive is eventually going to fail.

[hc5duke]

Perhaps the initial backup would take some time but any incremental changes would be fast enough.

The network is your friend :-)

A network backup service also offers resiliency where a single non-RAID hard drive is eventually going to fail.

yes that is all true, but the o.p. wanted a solution for transferring large files between different computers, presumably binary files that will change content frequently - network backups chokes on these situations as the entire file is the "incremental change"

I tried the free version of Mozy for a bit, and it seemed pretty useful for most cases. but I ended up just getting an HP mediaserver instead. I like the idea of not having to rely on the internet for my backups, especially when it's gigabytes of old tv episodes and family photos/videos - hopefully some day I won't have to worry about that, but for now, I don't think Comcast is competent enough.