Which Lacie ext hard drive should I buy?

[Chic0]

Hi guys

I have a Powerbook G4 12" with 40gb hard drive. From all the tunes i've been cramming on to it I'm quickly running out of storage space so have decided to purchase a Lacie ext hard drive.

The problem is I'm not sure which one to go for. sHOULD I go for one of the firewire ones or USB2? I have an iPod so need to be able to connect to laptop via firewire. If I do go for the firewire ext hard drive, would I be able to daisy chain and connect the ipod to that?

Thanks

C

[Randman]

If you have an iPod, you can manually manage your collection and delete the songs from your hard drive. Of course, it helps to have a backup of your music somewhere, either on an external or on CD/DVD.

[Chic0]

Cheers. I already know I can manage my music on my hard drive. Maybe I didn't make my message clear :-)

One of the things I'd like to know is which lacie hard drive to buy and also whether I'll be able to daisy chain my ipod into the hard drive via firewire connection.

[Randman]

Yes, you can daisy chain your iPod via FW. As far as which, what's your budget?

[Chic0]

Cool. My budget is about £100-120.

Thinking going for the Lacie 'Porsche designed' 160gb drive.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I would recommend staying away from the F.A. Porche drives. People have reported problems with them, and, they are built around a slower chipset than the regular LaCie D2 drives.

The LaCie D2 drives get glowing reviews all the time.

The Porche drives are sub-par in terms of quality, if you ask me, and you end up paying for the Porche name and not Porche quality.

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-57990

[aicul]

I have recently looked into an external hard drive for my mac. Let me share my experience.

My choices came down to LaCie Porsche or Maxtor Mac formatted OneTouch both at 250Gb. I tried both as I had the opportunity to do so.

My conclusions were as follows based on a short 48 hour test:

Price Difference: 30$ in favour of LaCie

Hardware (the disk): No visible difference. LaCie had a low level shake on desktop. Maxtor slightly bigger box.

Connections: Maxtor had simple A/C connector with long cable and clearly labelled on-off switch. Might sound stupid, but the A/C connector of LaCie has an unmarked up/down orientation and had a short cable. Similarly LaCie was not bothered to indicate on switch what was on, or off .

Software: This made the real difference. I bought the drive as for backups. Frankly LaCie software (Silverling) is worthless. It crashes, does not do what it claims to do and is incapable of alerting users to any encountered problems. The Maxtor Dantz software is a little difficult to grasp but it works smoothly. A very welcome paper manual indicates steps to backup and restore. Might sound silly, but when your Mac has crashed a PAPER manual indicating what one should do to recover from backup is a godsend .

I have settled for the Maxtor OneTouch Mac preformatted drive.

Hope this gives other reads a useful insight into what to look-out for.

[ora]

I have 2 lacie d2 drives and they work great. A note- the Firewire only drives have 2 FW ports so allow daisy chaining, while the triple interface (FW400, FW800, USB2) have only one, though anyway i'm not sure if daisy chaining works with the iPod (with my 2G iPod anyway).

Personally I'd go with triple interface anyway (so its ready for the G5 you will buy in the future! ), especially if you are a student, because you can buy them from the apple website with a student discount. The triple interface drives also come with plenty of decent quality cables for all the ports it has, plus an iLink (mini 4pin firewire) cable for digital video cameras.

I, like others, had heard to stay away from the Porche drives, and also (with all respect to aicul's experience) that the maxtors weren't so good either.