[Flipside]

Just a quick question to those who know. It's becoming obvious to me that I am going to need a 3rd Drive soon, I simply cannot keep burning stuff off to DVD all the time, it's expensive and I spent ages copying all my old CD's off onto DVD, I don't want to have to do that all over again converting loads of DVDs to HDDVD or Blue-Ray in a few years time.

Mostly what I'm looking to back-up is large libraries, some of my Orchestra Samples can take up to 5 or more Gigabytes of Disk-Space, but they need to be accessible when I am using the program, which forbids copying them off to DVD, because the load speeds drop to stupid levels, causing skipping etc. I don't have room for another internal drive because there's so many wires already inside my computer, there's no room to manouvre the thing into place.

So, my question is this, What is the best sort of External HDD to get? The one I'm currently looking at is a USB2 one, sitting at half a TB.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?FRE-28604

Is there any particular advantage in speed with Firewire? And is it worth the price increase that using Firewire seems to entail?

Any help appreciated

[IceFire]

Firewire is 400mbps and UBS2.0 is 480mbps.  I believe Firewire has a small advantage in larger files but I can't remember. You're good either way.  If you have a G5 Apple and Firewire 800 (at 800mbps) then it might be useful.

[jr2]

There was a little discussion here, if that helps any.

[Flipside]

The files I'm storing are large files, but they are multi-file archives, so they aren't being read all at once. Looks like USB2 will be the best option, 480Mbps should be fine for most of the stuff I'm doing. Things like Games will stay on the IDE rigs, but certainly it's enough speed for where load times aren't totally essential.

Thanks

[jr2]

...USB2 is the interface, not the underlying technology.  I have a 300GB USB2 external IDE hard drive.    I also have a 1GB USB2 flash drive.  I do believe that the drive you were asking about is IDE.  I have yet to see a 500GB flash drive. 

[Flipside]

Heh, well, I was referring to the interface with the computer Internal IDE drives work as fast as the IDE Port, external ones work as fast as the port that connects them to the computer (unless, of course, that port is actually faster than the IDE/SATA drive itself)

I'd be scared of a 500 GB Flash Drive, that's far too much memory to be able to fit into your pocket and physically lose

[jr2]

...IIRC you can get almost UDMA/66 with USB2.  The thread I linked to earlier had that info.

[Flipside]

Aha, got it now thanks, the link I think you meant was on the first page

[Taristin]

eSATA

[Flipside]

I'm not actually certain my board is SATA compatible to be honest, there are 2 versions of the P4P800, as far as I can tell, one has SATA support, the other doesn't. I'm not sure which I've got.

[Thor]

if your going to do videowork on the drive forget USB2.  Firewire or eSATA is the way to go.  I prefer firewire over usb2 in general as i find its a more reliable speed then usb seems to be, but i'm a biased filmmaker.

there's also firewire 800, but you'd need an adapter card for the pc. same for eSATA unless you have a newer motherboard with an eSATA port...

[Flipside]

Well, it'll mostly be 2-300k Audio files in .wav format I'm storing, but they are in large archives of soundbanks (Over a gig each). With Video work it's not so terrible, I can just move the file onto the internal drives if I need to work on them  and then move them back afterwards if it comes to it, my animation demands aren't nearly as high in stored resources as my audio ones are.

[Col. Fishguts]

There are external drive cases that have both USB2 and Firewire interfaces. So you could compare the speeds yourself, if you have both interfaces available on your PC.

[Clave]

I have a Freecom 320GB USB2 drive, which is fast and reliable, if a tad noisy..

[jr2]

I went and bought a normal internal 7200RPM IDE drive and got a case for it.
The cases are around 20-30 bucks, and then you just buy whatever drive you like and stick it in.  (Just be sure that they both support IDE, or both support SATA.)