Help choosing from these external hard drives

I have a macbook 2.0ghz, 120GB HDD and I need more. The options have been narrowed to the following, both of which have 320GB and IEEE 1394a (Firewire 400):

Seagate FreeAgent Pro ST303204FPA1E3-RK 320GB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 / IEEE 1394a / eSATA External Hard Drive This is selling for $100 at Fry's.

Western Digital My Book Premium WDG1C3200N 320GB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 / IEEE 1394a

I'm also open to other options. I've noticed that by wanting a firewire, I've dismissed A LOT OF HDs out there that have excellent reviews. Maybe firewire isn't that important and USB 2.0 can do the job, huh?

 

USB 2.0 transfer rates hit a ceiling at around 25MB/s. I think Firewire can go up a bit higher.

Personally, if it were my money I would get the enclosure with eSATA. This seems to be the way forward for external discs since you can run at the speed of the SATA interface. I've just got a 2.5" eSATA enclosure and an Express card adaptor and the HDD will run at the same speed in the enclosure as it does inside the notebook.

John

 

esata on a macbook? don't i need an adaptor or something for that?

 

I bought a Special Edition MyBook 500Gb this summer and it works great. The only thing that really buggs me is the lack of an on/off switch. Insted it features an auto on/off switch that turns the harddrive on and off along with your computers. Problem is that if you put you computer in stand by mode (like I always do with my laptop), the hard drive doesn't shut off. You can force the hard drive to shut off by pressing the blue ring button for 5 seconds but there are times where it will refuse to shut off until you try it a few times. That and my mp3 fm transmitor that shuts itself off when no song is playing (and very often when a song IS playing) producing a loud eerie noise, convinced me to NEVER again buy anything that incorporates an auto on/off fonction that can't be turned off or overriden.

 

Yeah I know what you mean. An on/off switch would be nice, but the WD My Books have really good reviews, especially the basic ones WITHOUT Firewire (not the pros or premiums). Actually, for some reason beyond my understanding, the USB-only externals have much better reviews than the ones with firewire. Makes me wonder whether I should just forget about using a firewire.

 

Maybe people with FireWire are pissed off since they paid more and notice the annoyances more.

 

what are the annoyances?

K this is also in the options now, along with the seagate and WD that i have linked above:
LACIE Design by F.A. Porsche 301103U 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache USB 2.0 External Hard Drive This one's actually 500GB, but no firewire.
Opinions?

 

OK, perhaps 25MB/s is a little pessimistic. I attach three separate measurements for my 3.5" external HDD (Freecom enclosure with USB2.0 interface). HD Tach shows just over 30MB/s (the blue line on the graph is a 2.5" WD2500BEVS in a different enclosure, but very similar speed), HD Tune struggles to reach 23MB/s and SiSoftware Sandra is somewhere in between (that graph shows the WD2500BEVS as internal HDD, the WD2500BEVS on an eSATA interface and three separate USB enclosures).

If you've got an enclosure with a better interface performance, please post the test result.

John

 

hi john mines an 2.5" 5400rpm formac usb2 powered 160gb external self-contained enclosured drive (thats a mouthfull ) not the usual 3.5" in a external caddie and also the speed i refer to is what i get or is shown in the onscreen vista box that comes up when you are coping/moving files from it to the internal drive on my laptop so i havent actually ran sandra or other benchmark test but vistas own dialogue says its in the 30mb/s when moving files tho it average is in the 20's

thanks

 

lol punctuation would be nice!

 

i was in a rush at he time

 

alright, so since people aren't really helping here (thanks to the ones who have), I'm just going to mention this, just to add information and in case someone else does a search one day. Seagate's warranty is 5 years, Western and lacie is 1 year (but can you believe Lacie's price? It was even cheaper here in Canada, on sale, and they're all out now ).
And since HDs are so sensitive, I think a 5-year warranty is a HUUUUUUUUUUUGE advantage over the others.

Just a thought.
But Lacie's. Crap, makes you want to forget about the warranty.

 

The 5 year warranty is pretty temtping. SeaGate and Western Digital's hard drives are just as good but yeah.. LaCie is crap.... aren't they only sold in FutureShop in Canada? I always thought it was the futureshop home brand consisting of rebadged Maxtor drives.

 

No you're wrong. The link I posted for Lacie is for newegg.com, so it's also sold in the US, and it's its own brand. Some lacie products have a pretty good rating on cnet, and the lacie 500gb porsche design has the highest rating on futureshop.ca amongst the HDs.

 

Most important advantage that Firewire drives have over USB 2.0 is that CPU utilization is way lower. I read this in dutch tests.


On Lacie: I have a Lacie drive that works perfect but I have read from many users that Lacie is not as reliable as WD.

 

That's good to know. Although frankly, I think Seagate's 5-year warranty makes it way more attractive than WD.

 

Well, if I say it more accurately, Lacie external HD's reliability was below par.

I don't know about the Seagate ones.

Presumably the problem in the Lacie's is the small casing w/o ventilation that makes them go hot.