What do you think are good external firewire drives for media (QuickTime, etc.) and other stuff?

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID.cfm (or the drive)

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/

Anything else? BTW, forget LaCie--I've seen three drives die in under a year and that's terrible.

heath

I have two Maxtor 250GBs that have lasted for over a year of heavy use and travel.

Is there a big performance difference between using the firewire 800 transfer and an internal ide or sata hard drive. I noticed that the benchmark for the firewire G-Tech drive was of 53 MBs(read) on 1 Mb file. Isn't the read/write performance of an regular IDE drive of 133 mbs?

Yes internal drives will be faster than firewire drives. The drives in firewire cases are IDE, and there is a kind of transformer from IDE to firewire, but the limit is the speed of the drive.

The best solution appearing right now is SATA. There are numerous types of PCI or PCI-X cards with both internal and external SATA connections. LaCie markets D2 drives where they include a card for the same price as a firewire drive. This is much faster than firewire 800 and there is no overhead as the data is transfered natively since both the connection (cables) and drives are SATA.

Personnaly I've ordered a Sonnet Tempo-X 4+4 card and their Jive system allowing to add 3 drives inside a G5. I've discovered since there are some cards out there that allow you to make RAID drives without requiring processing power. I don't know if this is the case of the Tempo-X, but anyhow I'll have a three drive RAID to start off with and when required I'll be able to add an external four drive RAID.

Cheers,
Damien Molineaux
earthling productions

PS Also, this is well documented, the implementation of firewire 800 on all G5s (except maybe the dual-cores which haven't been tested yet) is flawed and not nearly as speedy as it should be.

I agree Damien, I've used different combinations of Firewire drives on a G5 and the performance is not as good as with the internal ATA drives.