Portable harddrives

B

bearpaw45

Registered
Hello,
I'm thinking of getting a portble harddrive (LaCie??) to store my digital photos and was wondering if anyone had opinions on what to get or what kind to avoid?
I'm running Jaguar 10.2.1 on a G4 powerbook. I guess I've eliminated iPod as a choice because of the Firewire issue and my digital camera capibilities.
Thanks.
peg
 
Definitely avoid Que drives at any and all costs. Their drives are not stable and their customer support is dismal to non-existent. Depending on the size of drive you need, EZQuest and Lacie are fantastic. I use a little 20GB drive at work and it's never had any problems. The Lacie has has both USB and Firewire connections, though the USB is MUCH slower. If you only need it for storage, just allow extra time for large files and never copy over more than 500M-1GB at one time. There can be problems with file sizes larger than this--you get freezes and crashes sometimes. I think the drive might even be powered by the USB cable, but not sure.

Hope this helps!

Nato
 
I bought a La Cie 60gb drive last September, the studio edition I think it's been called (the silver and blue one). Any way, it's just fire wire, no usb. I bought this drive to use with my Windows 2000/ME PC and it works great. I also use it to tranfers large files from home and to school and have no problems connecting it up to the G4s and G3 we have at school. I know that my drive is a 7200 rpm drive so I use it to store DV video I've captured.

One issue I have noticed, is that if I try and capture video from my mini DV camcorder via fire wire straight onto the La Cie drive, I get dropped frames. So I have to first capture to my internal 5400rpm drive to not get any dropped frames, and then transfer over the files to the fire wire drive. Other then that, no problems.

La Cie has their newer D2 design which I've seen and look 10x better then my drive :( and are smaller too.
 
The new LaCie D2's are great looking and small, but weigh a ton. Their innards are also not built to be truly portable. If you are looking for an "external" hard drive, then I would recommend them for their speed, stability, looks and lack of fan noise.

If you are looking for a "portable" hard drive, you need something smaller, lighter and intended for this purpose. These units have similar drives to those in the ipod or in a laptop and are designed to take the rigors of travel. The sacrifice here is speed, but it doesn't sound like you will be doing audio or video work, so that's not an issue. Lacie has a good line-up and Other World Computing does as well. My personal favourite is SmartDisk. I have the 5G Firefly, which is 2/3 the size of a Zip 100 disk and oh so much faster. Check the store at their website and look for their refurbished products.
 
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