Thinking about getting an external HDD.

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27 Jan 2005, 10:18 PM
Tragic

Thinking about getting an external HDD.

I have a G4 ibook and desperatly need ore HDD space so I was thinking about getting an external. My big question is if I any will work or do I need one supported by Macs specifically. Also, any reccomendations for drives between $100 and $150 are appriciated.
27 Jan 2005, 10:43 PM
stormy

any should work, and assuming you have firewire, firewire>USB2.0 because of the higher sustained bandwidth. Check the suggestions going on in the other thread.
28 Jan 2005, 05:10 AM
Master

Could you quantify "higher sustained bandwidth"? Doesn't USB 2 have a slightly higher rate of transfer? Please explain.
28 Jan 2005, 12:59 PM
stormy

Here's some stuff from Tom's hardware.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toms hardware

FireWire - The Story So Far

FireWire was first established as the IEEE 1394 standard in 1995. With a rate of up to 400 Mbps, this port (also known as i.LINK from Sony or Lynx from TI) was far superior to any other available protocol at the time. It also offered the ability of setting up and interrupting the connection while operation was in progress ('hot plugging').

The 1394 standard is a bus protocol, which can accommodate up to 63 devices. Unlike BNC networks or SCSI, these devices do not have to be physically connected in series, but can also be arranged in branches. Moreover, a signaling cable does not have to be terminated with a resistor, and device addresses are assigned dynamically in the background.

In recent years, FireWire has also become a standard feature for high-end motherboards. Texas Instruments, VIA and others all now offer corresponding, highly affordable FireWire controller chips.

Moreover, despite a theoretical lower data transfer speed compared to USB 2.0, IEEE1394 consistently offers slightly faster transfer speeds in practice, and the CPU load is lower with high quality FireWire chips.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage...402/index.html

Here are some graphs for an External WD drive:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage...center-08.html

Firewire outperformed USB2.0 by enough of a margin to make a real world difference. This result isn't isolated for this drive either, every drive i've seen had similiar disparity.
28 Jan 2005, 01:36 PM
cka

If you wanna take a cheap route out, you can simply buy a normal IDE hard drive and an enclosure for it...
30 Jan 2005, 08:51 PM
Mykozo

Quote:

Originally Posted by Master

Could you quantify "higher sustained bandwidth"? Doesn't USB 2 have a slightly higher rate of transfer? Please explain.

USB2 = 480 mbps
Firewire 400 = 400 mbps
FW 800 = 800 mbps

FW 800 won't transfer at 800mbps though if you are not using a 9 pin config.
30 Jan 2005, 08:54 PM
stormy

But the point is that firewire 400 is still better than USB2.0, even though it theoretically offers less bandwidth.
31 Jan 2005, 10:33 AM
mollipen

On a Mac, I'd go FireWire. It seems more stable, and then your USB ports are still open for other things.

My TiBook only has 20G internal, so I have a 160G external drive. It's basically just a regular IDE hard drive in a FireWire enclosure that I picked up from CompUSA. If you're looking for cheap, this is probably your best bet. The only problem is the quality of the FireWire enclosure - you might want to be a bit picky. With mine, it works great as far as the drive goes, but the extra port on it is a bit bum. If I plug my iPod into the extra port, not only does it not charge the battery, but it seems like it actually drains the battery. As I have all of my music on the external drive, and my TiBook only has one FireWire port, it's a bit of a pain.
01 Feb 2005, 12:39 AM
Mykozo

Quote:

Originally Posted by shidoshi

On a Mac, I'd go FireWire. It seems more stable, and then your USB ports are still open for other things.

My TiBook only has 20G internal, so I have a 160G external drive. It's basically just a regular IDE hard drive in a FireWire enclosure that I picked up from CompUSA. If you're looking for cheap, this is probably your best bet. The only problem is the quality of the FireWire enclosure - you might want to be a bit picky. With mine, it works great as far as the drive goes, but the extra port on it is a bit bum. If I plug my iPod into the extra port, not only does it not charge the battery, but it seems like it actually drains the battery. As I have all of my music on the external drive, and my TiBook only has one FireWire port, it's a bit of a pain.

Ipod's are weird, connect the ipod firewire to my Lacie 200gb made the comp recognize the ipod, but not the drive anymore.
02 Feb 2005, 01:47 AM
Tragic

Quote:

Originally Posted by shidoshi

On a Mac, I'd go FireWire. It seems more stable, and then your USB ports are still open for other things.

My TiBook only has 20G internal, so I have a 160G external drive. It's basically just a regular IDE hard drive in a FireWire enclosure that I picked up from CompUSA. If you're looking for cheap, this is probably your best bet. The only problem is the quality of the FireWire enclosure - you might want to be a bit picky. With mine, it works great as far as the drive goes, but the extra port on it is a bit bum. If I plug my iPod into the extra port, not only does it not charge the battery, but it seems like it actually drains the battery. As I have all of my music on the external drive, and my TiBook only has one FireWire port, it's a bit of a pain.

Well, the thing is I connect my ipod through firewire so shouldn't I want to leave the firewire open and go with a usb drive?

Also, could you explain this "cheap" route? I like cheap but everything above might as well be Greek to me.

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