I am a film student at Berkeley Digital Film Institute and I need to get an external 500GB drive for my work. I was looking at a drive from New Egg and was wondering if you think I should get it.
The drive you are looking at costs $120. This is a nice price.
You might want to look at this one that costs $99 with rebate.
Unfortunately, your instructor told you to get a drive with a Firewire 800 external connection and the one you are looking at is USB 2.0.
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USB 2.0 is about equal to the speed of Firewire 400 (1394a).
USB 2.0 is about half as fast as Firewire 800 (1394b).
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To make matters even more confusing, SATA is another connection that is even faster than Firewire 800. It was developed to be smaller, faster and cheaper than Firewire. Many internal drives use SATA.
There is just one problem – Macs can not connect directly to SATA drives since they do not have an external SATA port!
Here is a $70 case with a SATA internal and a Firewire 400 / USB 2 external connection.
Here is a $100 case with a SATA internal and a Firewire 800 external connection.
Please note that these prices are for the case alone! You will still need to purchase a 500GB SATA hard drive to put in these cases. Here is a $150 500GB SATA drive.
$120 for USB 2.0 vs $250 for Firewire 800 with internal SATA
5 years ago film folks would have been ecstatic to have that amount of space at USB 2.0 speeds. Now that you can get almost double the speed using SATA/Firewire 800, people with cash buy the faster drives.
If you are tight on cash, purchase the $100 USB 2.0 solution and run with it…