Disk Firewire
Thursday, September 1st, 2011
What should I look for in an external hard disk drive?
I’m looking to buy a 1TB external hard drive to use for media storage (HD1080P60 footage) for my iMac G5.
I’m not asking what specific HDD I should buy, just what sort of things should I be looking for?
Speed isn’t a huge issue, I know that FireWire is faster than USB, but what’s the standard RPM and are there any other specifications I should look for?
FireWire 400 is faster than USB 1.1, but slower than USB 2.0. FireWire 800 is faster than USB 2.0. eSATA is faster than FireWire 800, but your iMac will most likely not support eSATA by default. The default RPM for a hard drive is 7.200, but there are both slower and faster drives. A RPM of 7.200 is sufficient though for any external hard drive. But to be able to use this speed to its fullest, you need to use USB 2.0 minimum. If possible, purchase an external hard drive which supports USB 2.0 and FireWire 800, so that you are sure to be able to use the drive on various types of computers at the best possible speed. A hard drive has its own memory which is used when copying or moving files. The larger this cache, the better. Purchase a drive preferably with 32 MB cache. Western Digital provides various external hard drives by the way which are pre-formatted for Mac OS X.
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