External Hard Drives

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MacManc

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I was looking at a bunch of externals for my powerbook. As I see it, there are many options (USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800). I found a external that used Firewire 800 Various Externals . Is the extra cost worth the speed? (The External I am refering to in the link is the 250 gig firewire 800. Thanks
 
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Your Mac's Specs
PowerBook 12" Combo Drive/867 MHz/256 MB RAM/40 GB hard drive/Mac OS X 10.3.5/AirPort Extreme it sux
Does your PowerBook have Firewire 800?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
PowerMac G5 Dual 2GHz (June 2004), 2.5GB, Airport, black 5G iPod 30GB, white MacBook 2.0 2GB
Actual Harddisk speeds are 133Mb/s for ATA and 150Mb/s SATA.
Inside an external HD is nothing else than an ATA or SATA harddisk. Taking in account that Firewire 400 has 400 Mb/s, I don't think that there really is a noticable speed increase with FW 800 (800Mb/s)...only if the external HD uses cache memory this would be a benefit for speed, because the transfer speed computer to HD is faster than the HD itself.
 
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zabba

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I have the Lacie D2 Extreme (250 GB). It has both 400 and 800 and is extremely fast. Having both is especially good when using Final Cut as you can connect both the video camera and the external hard drive at the same time.

Regarding speeds, please check the following link:

http://www.barefeats.com/fire35.html

Good luck!
 
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jp_tix

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i would go with the 800 because with the 400 sometime in the future you will be stuck with a HD that's not really up-to-date. the 800 will defenitely last longer as the machines themselves becomes faster. ugh...
 
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MacManc

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Yeah, my computer has the Firewire 800. So I was planning on getting a HD that can use this transfer. There was a contradiction with ideas with the advice and I was wondering if getting a more expensive firewire 800 capable HD is worth it if all HD arent capable of that transfer rate? Can you clarify this and perhaps suggest some good HDs to buy? Thanks Again
 
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800 is a bigger difference. Speeds increase almost 20Mb/s

400 is around 40Mb/s
800 is around 60Mb/s

with an SATA II drive tested.
 
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