External Hard Drives

[marcus]

Im wanting to move all my MP3s (160gb +) onto an external, portable hard drive, and am looking at this baby - http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10586 - wondering if anyone has used this and have any thoughts. Ill hook it to my Mac Mini which AFAIK uses Firewire 400. Scan have a 300GB Maxtor which is also nice, and a little bit cheaper.

Whenever I buy a new HD, I always think to how it seems like yesterday that I was paying around 200 quid for a "massive" 20GB hard drive.

[FelixofMars]

Yeah I am looking into getting an external next, they are so cheap and the USB2/Firewire ones are pretty fast, I always think that it was funny that the 40mb ones where cheap at ?200 or so only 10 years or less back

[Paleface]

I've got one of the Lacie Porsche 200GB firewire drives. It's nice - the fan isn't too loud but given the TINY firewire cable it comes with I haven't hid it under the desk, where it wouldn't be heard, so I only switch it on when I need it. If you don't have your computer on your desk but on a shelf or whatever, it'd be fine. Also, the noise is slightly dependent on the drive inside the casing they've chosen - no idea what that is.The Porsche has an on-off switch and TWO FW400 ports - so you can daisy chain; my iPod dock goes into the back of it.

I've been pleased with my Lacie, which I'm mainly only using for backup, big audio files and my iTunes library (because I don't need my tunes on my laptop when I'm out of the house) right now.

One big thing: don't start using it out of the box; open Disk Utility and reformat it as HFS+ (as opposed to NTFS). Whilst OSX can read/write NTFS, it's not very reliable and could break somewhere along the way... Mac HFS+is much safer.

Other than that, looks fine to me. Mac Mini is FW400, which (for someone whose mac doesn't have USB2) is fine; transfer of about a gig a minute usually. Also, will work out of the box. Personally, I'd go for the Lacie, but that's just me

[kona]

I've gone for the 2.5" inch Lacie drive (http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10558). They only go up to 100GB, but it's so convenient for carrying around.