External storage. Regardless of unit you're still limited to USB speed

[Rob94hawk]

My daughter wants an external drive. She has an Mac pro. Do they come with Firewire B? Isn't that faster than USB 2.0? Do they even make external drives for firewire B?

Seagate? 32GB Flashdrive? So many choices.

 

[vectravl400]

The new ones do come with four FW800 ports, but even FW400 is faster than USB2 in real life (just not on paper).

 

[Rob94hawk]

http://www.lacie.com/download/more/WhitePaper_FireWire_800.pdf

 

[cyclone3d]

I'm not a mac guy, but I would think an uber expensive system like a mac pro would come with at least one eSATA port.

Or does Apple not support eSATA yet?


Just looked the mac pro's up... Nope, no eSATA from the factory... what a crock.. Both my old computer with a Gigabyte board and my new computer with an ASRock board have eSATA ports built in... and I didn't even specifically look for that feature when shopping for a board.

In that case, get an eSATA card and an external drive that has an eSATA port on it. It will be just as fast as hooking it up to one of the SATA ports inside the computer.

 

[Rob94hawk]

The new ones do come with four FW800 ports, but even FW400 is faster than USB2 in real life (just not on paper).

I'm not having any luck finding a decent hard drive using firewire 800.

 

[novadude]

Firewire drives are almost exclusively tied to macs and are priced accordingly.

Take a look at this 1tb Lacie for $150, or this WD 750gb for $110.

They also make smaller laptop sized drives. What size drive does she need?

 

[Cyant]

Build one. Hard Drive + external FW800 case cheaper than retail external drives.