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As I get more into digital the 20Gb drive on my iMac is looking way too small!
I've been looking at Maxtor, LaCie an Iomega 160Gb external firewire drives at around 140 (I can remember when a 100Mb disc array cost 80,000!)
Who out there uses what? Any recommendations for hardware and supplier very welcome.
Alan
I have a LaCie 120 GB external drive. At present its only used as PS scratch disc (and keeping a spare copy of my system), but have had no probs.
I have a LaCie d2 Firewire drive (60GB). They are very solid (metal enclosure) and it has been totally reliable so far... and it's faster than my Mac's built in drive!
I bought mine from www.macwarehouse.co.uk.
Ed.
If you have firewire ports then the choice is limited compared to PC users with USB 2.0 however I found a good work around for using cheap internal IDE PC drives, CD/DVD writers etc.
You can but an external enclosure for around 40.00. It comes with firewire or USB 2.0 and all the required electronics for conversion built in but effectively they allow you to turn any internal IDE drive into an external firewire/USB 2.0 drive..
I bought mine for 45.00 and then bought an internal IDE DVD/CD rewriter that writes to both + and - versions of DVD... The drive is equivalent to the Sony + and - rewriter but cost only 100.00 so in effect I now have an external DVD/CD rewriter for less than 150.00. At the time the equivalent ready made firewire drive would have cost closer to 400.00..
The enclosure will also accept internal IDE hard drives. You could get an enclosure and buy a 160GB IDE hard drive to fit in it cheaper than an equivalent 80GB external firewire drive.
Software isn't a problem either, it works just like any external drive and best of all, you don't need to load any drivers as Mac OSX works very happily with this set up...
Just type external enclosures into a search engine to find one or try a computer fair as I did.
I intend to get another couple soon along with a couple of cheap IDE drives to upgrade my storage capacity...
I bought 4x Toshiba 320Gb external HDDs in May last year, I've now just had the third of them fail on me, all of them out of warranty. Toshiba offers no support for HDDs and refers you to the retailer, PC World don't want to know cos they're out of warranty. Just hope the Maxtors I've replaced them with don't give me the same grief.
I had mine for over a year Col, that's the problem! Last year it was a LaCie that failed on me, but the Porsche design LaCie's seem to have a problem with cooling, as I found out too late.
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