external firewire hard drive for mac

[gamba]

i just recently got basicly my first home project studio and the computer is a 27" 2.8 ghz 4 gig imac with 1tb hard drive.what i am looking for is an external firewire hard drive for mac. first i was going to go with a 1 tb but i dont know if the rule of thumb is to double your internal drive capacity. can any one please give me some suggestions?? i am afraid to start doing any thing with any of my equipment until i have some sort of backup dirve. thank you!!!!

 

[dgatwood]

Doubling the size is pretty much the minimum I'd consider using for a backup drive. No need for FireWire for a backup drive. Just get the cheapest drive you can. You can get a 2 TB drive for $75 or so these days. I'd do that. Either that or a Time Capsule.

 

[Uhdinator]

Since IMacs have one FW800 port, this is what I do

G drive 7200rpm with fw800 and fw400 in/out

Imac to drive FW800, FW800 to second Drive, FW400 out of second drive to interface with FW400. One projects drive and a backup drive.

Most will recommend ext drive to stream audio projects to it. Keeps internal from working as hard and does not fill it up.

 

[dgatwood]

Most will recommend ext drive to stream audio projects to it. Keeps internal from working as hard and does not fill it up.

I'd recommend using the internal drive if you can. The filesystem latency caused by using an external drive is substantial, so if you use the internal drive, you'll get significantly better track counts before things break. Unless, of course you're using a Mac Pro with an eSATA card or something. Then external is fine.

Also, be sure to not skimp on RAM. If your computer is paging to your internal drive while you're recording, that will significantly reduce track counts (regardless of whether you're recording to an internal drive or an external). In my opinion, a 3 GB setup is the absolute minimum configuration for recording in Mac OS X, and I'd recommend 4 or 6, depending on hardware configuration, if your machine can handle it.

As for using the internal drive too much... well, it's going to die eventually no matter what; all hard drives made in the last six or seven years suck. Might as well put almost all of your wear and tear on one drive to maximize the chances of it dying while your machine is under warranty and the replacement is free.