External Firewire Drives

Can anyone supply any relevant information regarding external firewire Hard Drives?
I need to purchase one so would love to hear pros and cons if you already have one.

i am interested in this topic too.

I've heard good things with both the LaCie D2 Triple Interface firewire & the Maxtor One Touch II firewire.

I'm curious how many out there think its important to invest in a firewire external HDD as a back-up. Is it a MUST?

An external hard drive of any kind is a must! I don't really have any recommendations, but I just have an external hard drive enclosure kit, and I just buy really cheap internal hard drives and just switch out my internal hard drives every once in a while.

I'll give this a try. I have an external notebook drive+enclosure that does Firewire and USB 2.0. G5 is still in the box waiting to be set up as soon as I can find a place to move
the Dell to.

I have another laptop drive that I need another enclosure for. They're really great for moving large amounts of data from machine to machine.

mmoy said:

G5 is still in the box waiting to be set up as soon as I can find a place to move the Dell to.

Click to expand...

Your G5 in still in the box, what patience you have! I'd be into that box as soon as that baby touch the floor of my house.

iWhat said:

Your G5 in still in the box, what patience you have! I'd be into that box as soon as that baby touch the floor of my house.

Click to expand...

Agreed. One thing I would advise is making sure the enclosure you get is bootable. Even if you don't think you will ever need the featire it is a nice one to have.

LaCie makes great external Firewire HDs...D2 triple is great, roommate's got that one.
http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10033
these are great as desktop and for, say, taking raw dig video around with you or as a fast backup.

iWhat said:

Your G5 in still in the box, what patience you have! I'd be into that box as soon as that baby touch the floor of my house.

Click to expand...

We've had one sick child with a high fever for a few days which has impinged on my sleep. Tonight I had two toilets to unplug (was successful with one so I can continue to work on the other one tomorrow).

But I have a bunch of performance improvements for Firefox that I wanted to code, build and test. We have plenty of computers around for the kids to use too. I was giving some thought to putting Linux on the cheap Dell box and giving my P4M 2.0 Ghz Windows machine to him (I don't use it much anymore and he could use it to build Firefox and play his games).

He wants to play with the Mac though. He's had some Unix experience so he can play with the command window if he wants. It's a lot nicer than MS-DOS.

It's not so much patience but a lot of things to do.

Kokopelli said:

Agreed. One thing I would advise is making sure the enclosure you get is bootable. Even if you don't think you will ever need the featire it is a nice one to have.

Click to expand...

I always thought that the property of bootable external drive was a function of the BIOS of a machine as the drivers have to be available to be able to recognize the device with the particular bus protocol.

mmoy said:

We've had one sick child with a high fever for a few days which has impinged on my sleep. Tonight I had two toilets to unplug (was successful with one so I can continue to work on the other one tomorrow).

But I have a bunch of performance improvements for Firefox that I wanted to code, build and test. We have plenty of computers around for the kids to use too. I was giving some thought to putting Linux on the cheap Dell box and giving my P4M 2.0 Ghz Windows machine to him (I don't use it much anymore and he could use it to build Firefox and play his games).

He wants to play with the Mac though. He's had some Unix experience so he can play with the command window if he wants. It's a lot nicer than MS-DOS.

It's not so much patience but a lot of things to do.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, but there's just no excuse... Just kidding with ya! Yep, you have been busy. I wish had a daddy that would let me play with command window, when I was younger. My dad is so low-tech that he has problems dialing the cordless phone in the house. You'd think after years of having cordless phone; he could remember to press the "Talk" button. He keeps complaining that rotary phones are better.

mmoy said:

I always thought that the property of bootable external drive was a function of the BIOS of a machine as the drivers have to be available to be able to recognize the device with the particular bus protocol.

Click to expand...

I thought so too for FW but some of my external enclosures will not let me install as a bootable partition and others will. I do not know why but I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it was the FW chip used in the enclosure.

For USB this is not the case though. Some usb chippsets are bootable some are not. 1394 is a peer level protocol though so I would not have expected it to have this requirement. Honestly I did not care enough to follow up and invstigate since I have 2 that I can boot from.

Took the Dell desktop off the computer table, brought it to the basement and took a vacuum cleaner to it. Dell's have gotten a lot better but there are still sharp edges inside and it's still a maze of wires.

Installed the Mac with broadband (wired), the Apple Keyboard and Mouse (figured out that the mouse plugged into the KB) and how to use the extension cable. I left the power cord in the office so I used the Dell's power cord.

Booted up on a 17 inch FPD. Tried to figure out what to show them on it. Did Firefox, the Unix shell and the applications launcher. Then we went to Firefox and started adding stuff to iTunes. It's amazing as to how easy it is to use.

The printer is plugged in though I didn't turn it on. I'm assuming that it will just work when I turn the printer on.

The kids are playing around with music which should keep them busy for a while. I need to package up an
SSE-optimized Firefox Release 1.0.1 version and upload it.

I use a Lacie porsche designed hard drive and it is great, no complaints and it has an extra firewire port so you don't lose the one on your computer by using it

I have an EZQuest Cobra+ 120GB and it's great. I use it as my boot drive (OS 10.2.8) since the 10GB drive in my iBook is too small to be an effective boot drive. Also, the EZQuest seems to run faster than my internal drive. The only complaint/annoyance I have with the EZQuest is the noise the fan makes when I first start it up - it "whines" for a minute or two, but then runs very quietly (if I would never turn the drive off, it would be a "perfect" drive). I own 3 EZQuest drives (Cobra+ slim - over 3 years old and still works perfectly, but now is used just to store a cloned back-up of my main partition; EZQuest Cobra+ CD/RW, 52x - super fast and totally reliable). The Cobra+ also comes with great software - Retrospect and SpeedTools (great for making perfect clones).

I haven't upgraded to Panther because of the problems with firewire drives. Does anyone know if it's safe to upgrade on a firewire 400 drive, especially if the fw drive is the boot drive? If it's not 100% safe, I'll wait until I've saved up enough money for a Mac Mini because I wouldn't want to lose all the data on my main drive(s).

Claire

I already have a Maxtor 120gb harddrive from my old PC and just need an external case. Can anyone reccomend a model number and/or place to buy a firewire model. All that I can find on NewEgg is USB 2.0 and I can't find anything on Outpost.

-Chris

For 3.5" drives I like the Warp, it is sort of expensive though.

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/products_id/932

Since you live in the Bay area I wonder if Weirdstuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale would have a Firewire drive cases.

Found this there.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/commerce/catalog/product.jsp?product_id=4063&czuid=1111174483656

They have a lot of other stuff like that if you go in person.

I have a Lacie d2 triple interface 160 gb external, I love it. as far as building your own drive, you can, its a lot cheaper, and easy. for example, didn't I make a thread on how to make your own external hd? if I didn't, click my sig and in the how to area, I know there's a how to make an external hard drive thread.

Sweet. Thanks guys. I'll check it all out.

-Chris