Products
External Hard drives
Following are external hard drives with both USB and firewire connections.
Mac's require firewire if you want to boot from an external drive (handy if your internal disk goes bad in the middle of a critical prject; assuming you have been backing up your files.)
For extra storage space a USB 2 drive (480 Mbits/sec) will be OK.
Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b) has a maximum transfer rate of 800 Mbits/sec.
These transafer rates are maximum burst rates, actual speed will be slower because of the protocol overhead and extra bits (start bit, stop bit, ...) required in serial transfer. USB has more overhead than firewire, so a USB 2 (480 Mbs) will actually be slower than a firewire 400 (400Mbs).
Typical Sustained Data Transfer Rate (STR):
FireWire 800: 40-50MB/s (2.5" 5400 rpm drive) 75-85MB/s (3.5" 7200 rpm drive)
FireWire 400: 30-40MB/s
Hi-Speed USB 2.0: 30MB/s
I got 11 MB/s from my 1GHz macBook G4 to an iomega LDHD250 on a mac formatted partition
and 8 MB/s to a FAT 32 formated partitiion
eSATA II 120 MByte/sec
Standard external drives use 3.5 " drives and with case are about 6.3 x 6.8"
Compact external drives use 2.5 " drives and with case are about 3.2" x 5"
PC World and cNet Reviews 2008: The following got good reviews: Standard (3.5 " drive) LaCie d2 Quadra 500GB $200 Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500GB $230 Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB $150 Iomega 400GB $350 Compact (2.5 " drive) LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive (compact) 160GB $130 LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive (compact) 320GB $200 Western Digital My Passport Studio (compact) 320GB $200
Network attached storage (NAS)
These are file servers and sometimes media (music, video) streaming devices that connect to your network and run independently of a computer.
[rating] out of 10.
Media and Data Servers:
LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini - Home Edition (500GB) $110-200 [6.7]
Iomega StorCenter NAS drive (250GB) $200 [6.3]
Media Only:
Apple TV (160GB) $320 [8]
Data Servers only:
Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS 150d (2TB) $750-800 [7.8]
Western Digital Essential Netcenter Network Hard Drive (250GB) [6.8]
Prices:
| Item | eBay new | Amazon | ClubMac | MacConnection | Costco |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LaCie 250GB Mar '09 | $83 | $90 | $106 | $110 | |
| Seagate FreeAgent™ Go 250GB | $75 | $79 | $88 | $90 | $80 |
| Shipping | free | free | $5 | $10 | $5 |
| Shipped from | ?? | S. Calif. |
Amazon (90), MacConnection (90), CDW (87), Costco (87), MacMall (84)
Stores: Price: Better.: Amazon, Costco, MacConnection, MacMall; Average: Office Depot, Staples, Best Buy, Fry; Worse: Apple Store, Office Max, Circut City
Terms:
ATA - Advanced Technology Attachment
EDSA - Enhanced Datamover and Storage Accelerator
eSATA - External SATA 3Gbit/sec (150 MByte/sec)
ESDI - Enhanced Small Disk Interface
HDD - Hard Disk Drive
IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics later renamed to ATA
NAS - Network attached storage
RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks
SAN - Storage area network
SATA - Serial ATA
SSD - Solid State Disk or Solid State Storage Device (e.g. flash or thumb drive)
STR - Sustained Data Transfer Rate
Links:
PC Hardware
Mac Hardware
External Hard Drive Reviews at ZDnet
NAS - Network attached storage at ZDnet
Data Comm interfaces
Flash Memory Cards and drives
Hard Disks at wikipedia
Hard Disk Drives: 3.5" or 2.5"?