External HD, will it be OK?

I need an external HD for my new imac, I have been considering this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000OS54TA/ref=ord_cart_shr/202-7513867-3056622?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE

I plan on storing music, documents, video and other data - I noticed that it is USB2, will this be fast enough for transfer and access files in itunes and quicktime / vlc?
I have a new ipod and I am wanting to use the drive for my music, will this be ok or not?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I'm using an external USB2 Western Digital HD for just that. Its pretty fast but obviously not as fast as the internal drive that shipped with the Mac. I don't think you'll have any problems.

It will work just fine. The speed of USB2.0 is pretty good. I don't think you will have an issue there. The one thing I would recommend that you pay attention to is noise. Some of these external hard drives can be pretty noisy. It sounds like you are planning on having this one on all the time as an extension of your iMac. So, be careful that you get one that uses a fan less enclosure and one that has a low noise rating. You may have to dig through the tech specs for all of your models of most interest to figure this out.

It will work, but it won't be all that fast. Music and Pics will be ok, but uploading large video (or other) files will drag, it's just the nature of USB 2. If you want more speed, get a Firewire drive, either 400Mbs or 800Mbs will be much faster.

Good point baggss. We are all guilty of answering just the question that was asked, as opposed to providing the best solution to the root problem!

baggss has a great point. If you can afford a Firewire drive (they may be a wee bit more pricey - they seem to be around here) you WILL find that performance is much better than USB2.0.

BTW, everything I have read says that Firewire 800 isn't that much faster than Firewire 400 in real world tests, even though it looks a lot faster on paper, so don't pop a lot of extra cash for FW800 vs. FW400. However, if the difference is modest, I would go for FW800.

I was thinking a firewire might be better, which is why I put a post up here, I was unsure. Some really good answers guys, I really appreciate it.
To be honest, I might be able to stretch to the price of a similar drive with firewire, but I don't mind a bit of noise - my old PC sounded like a wind tunnel, I could hear it downstairs!! Good riddance. ;D

Here is a post with some timed transfer tests between USB, FW 400 & 800 for your info.

I read some not so good reviews on the WD Elements drives. I was going to get one of those too. I think the Elements drive gets really hot. I went with the WD MyBook instead.

It appears that no matter what product on the internet you look at, you will find bad reviews, I know that every single one I have looked at has had good and bad. I heard the mybook was unreliable from a few sources, which is why I started looking at this HD.

The only thing that I know is that Western Digital and seagate are the better manufacturers of reasonably priced HD's. Thank you for that link, I will read it later on and get back to you.

I have both a WD 160GB FW400/USB 2.0 drive and a 200GB Seagate FW-400/USB2.0. The WD I have had for around 2 years now and it's never been shut off. Works like new. Seagate is at least 1 year old and works 100% also.

Firewire is a lot faster if you are going to transfer a lot of files and especially a lot of large files. In tests I did here it took 10 minutes for a 1.5GB Zip file with USB 2 and 5 Minutes with FW400. That was on a Mac Mini Core Duo, iMac G5 iSight and AMD 64 PC with FW400 card.

I just checked Bobs times and while similar in spread from USB to FW400, that 1.5GB file of mine was all MP3's compressed into one zip and it took so long USB 2. Maybe it was the MP3's in the zip. Not sure but FW400 is very fast and worth it if you do a lot of transferring of large files.

Well I plan on putting files on there from my PC (before I ditch it completely!), most of the files are under a gig, i think there are a couple that are higher, about 1.5. Once the transfer is complete, ill only be using the rest of the space for music and document backup.

It doesn't look like speed will be a major issue for what I need it for, remember guys - I'm used to windows painful copy / paste times.

As long as I can play the media files (music and video) from the HD without major / any streamin delays then that's fine. I was just concerned that if I put my music on there and played it through itunes it would take longer to buffer the tracks, if that makes sense. I don't mind a bit of delay, but nothing major.

But you see the thing is, Firewire400 drive doesn't cost that much more than the USB version. And in case of the WD Mybook, you get the one which has a cool space indicator and such.

Also, you don't want to use up all your USB ports. You rarely use firewire devices, but USB devices come by the dozens. One must have already been taken up by the keyboard so you are left with 2 full speed USB ports at the back...

I think the question has been answered almost completely so far, I just wanted to mention another point. from what you've posted I assume you're gonna have the drive switched on most of the time, I guess it's worthed paying attention to heating of the drive as well.
I had a WD 120GB which worked fine at the beginning when I was using it only for backups but later on I had it switched on almost all the time and after 4 months the performance was terrible and a while ago it just stopped working.
I am currently using this (Of course I needed this capacity and connection type) and it's been working great .

BTW try to go for Firewire the price difference would not be huge but the performance differs a lot. And forget about windows you're in the Mac world now

true.
but I do use firewire to capture video, although not all the time - can I use a USB hub in the back of a mac? I wouldn't put the HD in, but it would be good if I needed more space.

I'll check the firewire versions out anyway.

Yes you can, and most of the external HDs are self powered anyway. good luck on your purchase