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Portable Hard Drive??

S

SyMac


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Hi, what do you guys think about this portable hard drive here??

Iomega eGo Portable 500 GB External hard drive - 800Mbps(FireWire800)/400Mbps(FireWire)/480Mbps(Hi-Sp.USB)

I'm on a budget, but I keep hearing bad stories of portable drives, that they crash after so long. But my boss uses one and it hasn't failed yet. Seems so much easier to store things with it than to use DVDs, which took hours last night.

So I'm curious about two things...make that three.

1. What you think of this as a drive in general?

2. What you think of this as a drive that I could work off of/store all the media I'd work on in Final Cut Pro (Rendering, capturing, importing files from etc)? (If it's bad for that, I'd just use it as storage, and move the files from the drive to the computer in order to work with them.)

3. Would I be able to transfer files between Mac AND PC?

I want a reliable, PORTABLE hard drive. Even though I know those half-Xbox-sized things are probably more efficient, they're not portable in the least, and they have to be plugged into the wall.

Also, using a MacBook Pro

Thanks!
 
C

chas_m

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I used to really hate Iomega as a company (those Zip and Jaz pieces of ... er, hard plastic). But they seem to have reinvented themselves as a drive company and so far I've been pleased with the 1.5TB drive I got from them (I won it).

Self-powered portable drives are kind of tricky, which is why they have a bad rep generally: its hard for the drive to get enough power from the computer to consistently do the kind of things a "plugged in, full size" external drive can do, so you often hear reports of "bad performance" when trying to do things like watch HD video off of one. <rolls eyes>

That said, for storage it should be absolutely fine and should be no more or less reliable than any other hard drive (provided you don't abuse it).

I have a portable USB2 HD and I always keep it well-packed to avoid dropping or excessive jostling, *and* I always wait for it to fully spin down before unplugging. Seems to help, I've had no problems with it.

Oh, and about Mac to PC transferring: you can do this IF you format the drive as FAT32. The problem with this is that you are limited to files of 4GB in size. Some people get around this by formatting the drive as NTFS (which doesn't have that problem) and installing some kind of system plug-in on the Mac that allows it to read and write to NTFS (by default it can only read).
 
Doug b

Doug b


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I have the iOmega drive you linked, and I LOVE it. Had an Seagate... crapped out on me. Have a buddy who had the same Seagate... crapped out on him. The iOmega is really nice looking, built/designed very well and is FAST as lightening ! As far as power goes, I think that Firewire supplies power more efficiently than USB, so it shouldn't be an issue.

I would not hesitate to get another one, and I might do just that, instead of having these huge WD externals laying around. If I had to say anything negative about it, it would be that the activity light is incredibly, ridiculously BRIGHT ! Nothing a tiny piece of electrical tape of marker can't handle though.

Doug
 
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SyMac


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Alright guys, I went out and got one today, got the 3 year warranty with it as well. So far absolutely no complaints, as far as speed, it just copied 10 GB in 10 seconds. Seems to run fine directly in FCP so far. All seems fine now, if anything goes wrong in the future I'll awaken this topic :p

OH, but I notice about 25 GB is missing from it from the beginning, but that's probably just the files the drive needs to run, right??
 

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