I highly recommend a small Firewire hard drive for just such occasions. OtherWorld Computing has 20GB pocket hard drives for about $170. Get the 5400 rpm drive, and make sure it has the Oxford 911 chipset. You might also call MacTown to see what kind of drives they might have and their prices.
The benefits of these drives are speed, simplicity and size. They are much faster than burning data to DVDs, they are very compact, and all you have to do is plug them in and they show up on your desktop just like any other hard drive. If you go the DVD route, you will be looking at $3-5 per DVD. Transfer rates will be in the neighborhood of 2-3 MB/second and you can only use each disk once. Firewire hard drives will transfer 10-20 MB per second, making quick work of large files, and just like other hard drives, it's completely reusable - just drag old files to the trash when you're done with them. DVD-R is a fun technology for making movies, or possibly for long time data archival, but it's not really ideal for data transfers. Hope this helps! Bryan C. Forrest Macintosh Specialist LifeNet http://www.lifenet.org On Wednesday, June 4, 2003, at 03:16 PM, Beth Ernst wrote: > A couple of questions about DVD drives. > > I have a G4 800 MHz with a CD drive and another G4 w/mirror doors that > only has a CD drive as well. At the time we purchased these machines > we didn't see a need for DVD. Now we'd like to use DVD to transfer > large files (approx. 1- 2GB) between two locations. We normally send > our publications to our pre-press department over our T-1 connection, > but there has been the occasional time that the line has been down and > we are looking at a backup plan in the event it is down for a long or > crucial time period. Most of our publications will fit on a CD, but I > have a couple in excess of 1GB. Prior to getting our T-1 we used JAZ > drives but they are a rather unreliable media. > > What I wondering is can we replace the existing CD drives on these > machines with internal DVDs? > > Do they have to be Apple DVD drives? (I understand that Apple's > software will not work with external drives so I wasn't sure about > internal. ) > > If the drives can be replaced with internal drives what are some good > ones to look at? > > Is there a better, less expensive option, I'm not aware of to transfer > files of this size? > > Thanks! > Beth > > > > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be June 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>. > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be June 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
