best external storage drive?

I use a Netgear storage drive. Basically combines two 400 GB harddrives into one and connects to your computer by LAN wire. Its quite irritating cuz it takes some time to load and stuff. I dont know if USB 2.0 or LAN wire is faster. What do ya'll think?
 
Firewire vs. USB vs. LAN:

Firewire (IEEE 1394) has transfer modes designed for efficient high-speed streaming, and is the only protocol that can guarantee bandwidth. Thus even though USB 2.0 has a higher maximum throughput (480 vs. 400 mbps), in practice, Firewire is faster and more reliable. Firewire 800 is of course much faster (you need a fast drive array to really take advantage).

If by "LAN" you mean ethernet, you need first to check the speed - anything less than Gigabit Ethernet (1000BaseT) will definitely be slower than either Firewire or USB2, and I'm not sure about even Gigabit ethernet without real fine-tuning of the system. Ethernet is designed primarily for transfer of small packets rather than large streams. A good implementation with only two devices on the net should be able to handle the video well, but there are indeed lots of flaky implementations and cross-OS inefficiencies out there...
 
G-Drives, G-Raids, or MyBook Pro would be your best bet. If you can get something with firewire 800 on it do that. You'll appreciate the extra speed in the long run.

-Kyle
 
G-Drives are definitely the best, espeacially their G-drive Q (USB, F400, F800 and eSATA connections) they are a little pricier than other drives though. I have also been very pleased with Seagate. I just got a 300GB Seagate firewire drive for $180.
 
Frankly, I've had some problems with G-Drives; not major, but some flakiness with different computers or even different ports on the same computer. Of about 15 brands of drive I've used over the last 10 years, only Glyphs have been completely trouble-free. Even the 5-year old drives in daily use have never had so much as a stutter.

Really, there's no substitute.
 
We have several terabytes in OWC Micro drives here, so far only one problem with an enclosure failure (the drives themselves were fine) and they fixed it quickly.
 
i have a seagate (300 gigs) and it works fine, i just wish i had splurged to get the 500 gig version.

but anyhew, its a good drive, i dont have any complaints.


-brad
 
I picked up three Seagate external 300gig firewire/USB2.0 drives this summer for under $130 each... so far so good -- backed up all my P2 cards to one for my current project and have actually cut the entire movie from the external drive with no issues. Finishing that project this week, so I'm 3 months into using this drive and am very happy with it. Once finished I'll just unplug it and shelve it for archival purposes.
 
I just hooked up a Lacie Two Big to my PowerMac G5 and it is kick ass. 110MB/sec! It comes with the PCI-E card and hooks up via an SATA cable. The wild part is that you can pop the bare drives right out the front and swap 'em. They're Hitachi Deskstars inside.
I have mine set for RAID O for speed, but you can flip a switch in the back for RAID 1 - redunency. http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10772

-G
 
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