[fishguy]

I'm planning ahead for a future G5 PM purchase and need some advice on both scratch disk hard drives as well as external back-up drives. I want to add 2 additional drives to my G5 using a bracket and RAID them for use as a video and photo scratch disk. Storage of completed work would go in the second "apple approved" hard drive. I figure 2 -250 hard drives - any recommendations for this purpose?

Next I need external back-up drives for both completed works as well as works in progress. What route is better - firewire 800 drives or external SATA. If I add the 4+4 Sonnet Tempo X then I guess I can use it for both the internal scratch disks as well as the external back-up drives right? Or is it asking for trouble by trying to squeeze so much through a single controller? What is the better option in terms of price and performance?

I figure that since I won't run these drives full, that I can get away with 500-600 GB of back-up. Any recommendations for these drives?

Anyone have any trouble with the Sonnet 4+4 SATA controller?

thanks!

[zigzag]

www.barefeats.com might be have some helpful info

[tooki]

As far as internal drives, I recommend Seagate, because they offer the longest warranty by far on consumer drives. Seagate offers 5 years, all the others just 1-3 years, which I think says something about their own confidence in their quality.

Note that Seagate, etc all offer just 1 year on their external drives, so if you're the handy type, you might want to consider buying your own empty FireWire enclosures and installing your own internal drives into them.

tooki

[fishguy]

Thanks. I didn't notice that yet about the Seagate warranty.

[Krusty]

I second the Seagate recommendation. Even before they were giving the 5 year warranty, I've had flawless experiences with Seagates. There is not a Seagate drive I've bought that has failed yet.

They are not the absolute fastest drives on the market but they are pretty fast and, as a brand, quieter on average than others I've tried. I'm sure other manufacturers make some decent drives too ... but I've found a good thing with Seagates and I'll be sticking with them until I have reason not to.

[fishguy]

Is the 250GB offered by Apple a Hatachi?