I'm leaning towards Western Digital, just a question of which model. I have a laptop w/o a firewire port but w/ 2 USB 2.0 ports. Is there an advantage to using firewire to connect to the external hard drive? If it's a substantial advantage, then I might as well get a firewire pc card and get the firewire hard drive.

This seems to be the largest capacity drive they have - http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/....asp?DriveID=49
What do you think of this one?

 

There is a drive called the rocketpod!! It is awesome!

external with a built-in ethernet controller. I think mine is 160GB

and it is USB 2.0.

Got mine at best-buy with a rebate

 

http://www.4tress.com/home_4.html

Size and Weight

Length: 5.86 inches
(148.84 mm)

Width: 4.52 inches
(114.81 mm)

Height: 1.10 inches
(27.94 mm)

Weight: 15 ounces
(425 g)

Enclosure Materials and Finish

Enclosure Material: Aluminum Alloy 6061-T6

Enclosure Finish: Electroless Nickel-Plated

Exterior Non-Skid Location Pads: SBR

Mechanical Performance

Shock Dampening: Patented Visco-Elastic Dynamic Dampening System

Shock Resistance: Drive assembly will withstand a non-operating impact from a drop-height of 72.00 inches (1.83 metres) onto concrete.

Data Transfer

IEEE 1394/FireWire: Up to 400 Mbps

USB 2.0: Up to 480 Mbps

Interface

IEEE 1394-1995, 1394A, FireWire & i.Link

USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 backward compatible)

Ports

Two x 1394 FireWire/i.LINK

One x Mini USB


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Internal Hard Disk Drive

Storage Capacity: Formatted 30GB/40GB/60GB/80GB

Rotational Speed: 4,200 rpm

FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearing) motor for ultra silent operation

MTBF: 500,000 Hours

Average Seek Time: 12 ms typ.

Interface: Ultra ATA/100 (ATA-6)



Buffer Size: 2 MB (30, 40 & 60GB models) 8 MB (80GB model)

Shock - internal disk drive only (the Fortress drive assembly achieves significantly higher values):
Operating: 225G @ 2ms
Non-operating: 900G @ 1ms

Vibration - internal disk drive only (the Fortress drive assembly achieves significantly higher values):
Operating: 1.0G (5 to 500Hz)
Non-operating: 5.0G (5 to 500Hz)

Acoustic noise (Idle mode): 24 dBA at 30 cm (typ.)

Environmental Ratings

Ambient Temperature -
Operating: 41

 

I just bought three of these for a project at work. Need firewire for fast read access.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118

$1.15 per Gig 1TB=1000GB

Normal protocol for this situation is RAID but I have large library of proprietary CDRs that need to be in two distinct locales for audit puposes.

 

There's no advantage to Firewire over USB 2.0, USB 2.0 has slightly more bandwidth than Firewire. There were some sluggish USB 2.0 implementations in the early days but there's nothing in it now, the drive itself will make the most difference.

I run a 30GB 2.5" drive in a BlueEye case (http://www.shentech.com/blphsusl2usb.html) since it was the smallest case I could find at the time.

The 2.5" solutions can be bus powered, so no need to cart external plug packs around. The 3.5" solutions are all too power hungry from what I've seen. I also tend to think that the 2.5" solutions may be more robust for frequent travelling since those drives are designed to be carried around in notebooks. IBM even have a drive that parks the heads if it senses that it's been dropped, I believe.

Note that for bus powered devices you'll need to be connecting to a powered hub. The ports directly on your computer will be fine, ones one a keyboard or similar unpowered hub will not. Be aware that the peak current for a USB port is 500ma, so try to pick a drive which won't draw more than that. A super-fast HDD which draws too much current won't be much use to you for a bus-powered application.

 

buy a regular intenal IDE drive. Pick one. Maxtor is good. Then go to Newegg.com or favorite online place (I dont know if you can get one at BB or compusa), and buy a external enclosure for hard drives/cdrom/dvdrom. Get one with power. You are good to go, at a fraction of the price to buy an external drive. Uses USB 2.0 WORKS GREAT! Windows automagically will plug-n-play it.

 

fwiw... I have two Western Digital series 1 USB 2 external drives to provide offsite database storage for my wife's business, and they seem to be a good solution for the price. They do require external power though.
Bill