External HDD Caddy - Any Advice?

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Hey

i have had a powermac g5 for a few months now and im loving it. i am a student and will be going to uni in september to basically do video editing and filming etc. im wanting to sort out a decent simple hard drive setup that will prepherably use 2 external hard drives and hopfully hitting around the 1terribyte mark. the reasons for this setup is that i need space for editing and also for music and films etc. (so 1 hardrive for editing and the other for music...) the hard drive with music also has to be able to hook up to my windows based laptop.

i understand a fair amount about computers so putting this together isnt too difficult for me, i would just like some advice as to possible prepherences over hard drives and caddies. i once saw a caddy that held 2 hard drives that had been designed around the G5, looked cool but i cant find it anymore, anyone know what im on about?

anywho if any1 can give me any advice as to what to look towards then that would be great.

Cheers

Fraser
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15" 2.2GHz/4GB/250GB, G4 Cube 450MHz + 17" Studio LCD
I have one of these USB2/firewire 3.5" caddys:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=127643

It is excellent, slient fanless design and cool blue LEDs. You just put any 3.5" IDE hard drive into it.

I would suggest buying 2 of them, and putting a hard drive in each such as a Seagate 500GB:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=329662

The caddy has 2 firewire ports, so you can daisy-chain 2 together.

I think you will need to format as FAT32 if you want to share with your windows PC.
 
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Thank you for the fast reply, that caddy does look nice and i like it a lot however i was wanting to find something more silver lol, simply because it would go nicely with my G5. i will do some research and see if i can find a silver version possibly. and thanks for mentioning a 500gig HDD, i havent managed to find many.

if anyone else has any input feel free to add it, the more info the better :D. (also if anyone can tell me anything about the caddy that looks like a mini G5 that would be cool, also if its any good lol)

thanks

Fraser
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15" 2.2GHz/4GB/250GB, G4 Cube 450MHz + 17" Studio LCD
I have found a silver version:
http://www.savastore.com/productinfo/product.aspx?catalog_name=Savastore&product_id=10277968&pid=44

It appears that the 500GB Seagate drives are cheaper at Savastore too!
http://www.savastore.com/productinf...me=Savastore&product_id=10288168&pid=45&tid=2


EDIT: Is this what you were looking for?
http://www.jigsaw24.com/proddesc.asp?ITEM=X001AKA

It looks nice, but a bit pricey at £774.31 (inc. Del for 1TB) when the 2 caddies and 2 Seagate 500GB drives cost £442.24 inc. Del.
 
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thats for that mate, great help. yeah i think that might have been the caddy i was thinking of and yeah pricey lol. it will be a few months yet till i buy the setup so hopfully prices will have dropped a bit for the drives though i do like seagate, had a 60gig barracuda running for years in my old pc so i trust them. thanks for the help, if anyone else has anything to add im all ears.

thanks again

Fraser

ps: just a quick question, is there a real advantage over firewire to USB2? iv lost track as to which 1 is better for what things.

ta
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15" 2.2GHz/4GB/250GB, G4 Cube 450MHz + 17" Studio LCD
Firewire 400 runs at 400Mbits per second, whereas USB2 runs at 480Mbits per second.

However, USB2 has a bit more CPU usage, so the speeds are very similar. You can daisy chain the firewire drives to link up multiple drives.

However, the G-TECH G RAID 1TB also has firewire 800 ports too (which run at 800Mbits per second), which would be faster. But, I don't think it's worth an extra £330! The Icybox has FW400 and USB2 so you have a choice.

I currently own a Maxtor 200GB drive in my Icybox caddy and it is very noisy. Plus, it's corrupt its file system several times (running on my Windows system), so I do not reccomend Maxtor.

Seagates have a reputation for being fast, quiet and reliable. i built a PC for a friend with a Seagate and it runs nicely with no problems, and I am awaiting an 80GB Seagate for my iMac.
 
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Kokopelli

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While USB2 has better peak throughput, firewire is better suited for sustained throughput. Most comparisons (all I have seen) show firewire consistently beating USB2 deives on sustained read rights and disk access.
 

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