Not Mac or PC specific, went shopping in Tesco late last night and spied the iOmega external hard drive for £69, and I had a voucher which got it me for £64. Anyway what you get for the price is arather attractive 'Mac Pro' esque styled case in brushed aluminium with perforated holes on the end and a nice stand. Its a simple job of opening it up with two screws and what is inside....a 1tb Seagate Drive, the one with three platters and 32mb cache, it has a read speed os 105mb/s, its very fast. That model replaced the older 4 platter one which wasn't that fast, so it was a surprise to see it being used in this instance and not the older one, which apparently had firmware probs, but I checked this one and its the later good firmware.

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Wow, I may have a trip to Tesco tonight to see if they have one there!
would be good for backups and stuff...

USB only?

If it has Firewire as well, I may well visit our local Tesco.

I picked up a 500GB external for about £128 from the Apple Store the other week which has FW400.

Mark

This is the drive inside, and this is the cheapest I can find the drive on its own for :

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebP ... ce=froogle

It is USB only, firewire 400 is only quicker than USB on pre 2008 Macs. Apple intentionally gagged their USB to try and make firewire 400 look great, USB transfer speed on a PC has always been quicker than on a Mac, until Apple removed the firewire on most models and suddenly (cue Uncle Ben music) USB suddenly 'sped up' to pc speeds. Funny that.

On my Macbook its the same speed as on my PC, FW400 would only be quicker on older macs with 'gagged' USB.

ESata2 would be worth having though.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3197/296 ... ed.jpg?v=0

is a pic of what the drive looks like and no that is not my pic, found it on Google.

That sounds a bit pricey.

Whatever, I don't use USB for external drives. As it doesn't have FW, I won't bother buying it.

Thanks.

Cheaper than the option I was originally considering, so I'm happy.

Mark

+1

Mark

Not as good a bargain as this

Depends if it's the Oxford FW chipset - the enclosures alone usually fetch £50 on eBay.

FW/USB - different techs for different problems. USB isn't a replacement for FW, it was never designed as such. It was meant as a serial device for your mouse, printer etc. FW was intended as a replacement for SCSI peripherals. I'd still choose a FW drive over a USB one given the choice. I use USB 2 via a PCI card, and it's probably comparable to FW400.

That is very well priced, 1.5tb, esata, madness.

Firewire = solution looking for a problem.

It's a solution that solves my problem. Five daisychained drives is all but impossible with USB.

I'm not going to use USB for external drives whatever magic Intel do to make USB quicker. Sorry.

And as for eSATA, well, my laptop doesn't have it so that point's moot.

You forgotten the joys of having 6 SCSI devices chained to the back of a machine?
In a choice between using USB or FW for video, I'll take FW every time.