Stewart Woods wrote:
Hi all,
In the interests of quelling paranoia and preparing for Apple's
Oh-so-easy Time Machine come Leopard, I'm looking at buying an
external hard drive to back up all the important stuff on our home
network.
Looking at Zytech's prices for 500Gb Firewire drives, they're far more
reasonable than those at the Apple store (No surprise there), but I
was wondering if there is anything I should know about brands, USB 2.0
vs. Firewire, etc before I commit.
Are some better than others?
How much does the drive speed matter?
I'm hoping to back all our movies and music to the drive and stream it
to the other (4) machines - Will that be problematic?
Any advice is much appreciated,
thanks in advance
Stew
Hi Stew,
I have recently bought a few of these from Austin computers.
One unit was a Western Digital 400gb SATA drive in a NexStar
USB/Firewire case, $253.
Not that my laptop owning client needed it but it also had an eSATA
port, a nice bit of future proofing for folk who use towers.
Even more recently I have had sketchy results from 'Laser' brand
USB/Firewire cases.
These were 5.25 for DVD drives as well as hard drives; not happy Jan.
You have hit on that it is for your network as opposed to your
individual Macs, you may benefit from a NAS device; Network Attached
Storage.
These aren't as geeky as they sound as they aren't much more than a
USB/Firewire case.
Geeky? Linksys does a nice one that has Unix-enabled people excited as
they can fiddle around with it and connect media devices to it's USB ports.
NAS cases have an Ethernet port and an ever so slightly bigger brain,
physically they have similar overall dimensions to normal cases.
You plug them into an Ethernet port, Hub or Switch but they can also
have USB/Firewire ports for faster transfers, transporting etc. Some are
also media players with A/V ports.
So we have A/V ports, Ethernet ports, eSATA ports, Firewire and USB
ports. Sheesh!
I personally prefer Firewire over USB, I haven't seen it often but I
have seen Firewire cases perform a little more reliably than USB ones in
direct comparisons with regards to stability.
Others on this list have sited that Firewire is more suited to larger
files such as media, or was that just video?
'USB does packets and Firewire does streams' or words to that effect.
I don't think there is a lot in the argument of USB vs Firewire (400)
for most users.
HTH
Cheers
Paul
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