[york28]

I have a 2001 iBook, and I do a decent amount of audio recording and large graphics file work, and the 10 gig HD is quite confining, especially since I use it for 10.1 most of the time, which really likes to fragment the heck out of it, and then 9.2 for audio multitracking. This means that before each recording session I have to defrag the HD.....and it's getting old fast.

So I want to buy an external Firewire HD, something in the 7200, 60-80 gig range.

Now my question is why there is such a price discepancy between different brands. For example, the average drive meeting the above requirements in, say, the most recent MacMall catalog is in the $350-400 range I believe. But then there are these companies inline, such as piranhatech.com, that have a similar drive with the Oxford 911 chipset and then sell these drives for around $200ish, depending on capacity.

So what's the difference? Other than the more expensive one being pettier, is there any risk involved with getting a cheaper drive?

<small>[ 06-04-2002, 08:00 PM: Message edited by: york28 ]</small>

[mchladek]

As for the price differences I'm not too sure. But my belief is that the higher the price the higher the quality (to a certain extent), especially when it comes to HD.

I was kinda in the same boat as you. I was doing a lot of video editing on my 13GB iMac. Not pretty at all especially since I could only fit like 10 minutes on the disk. So I got a 60GB 7200RPM EZQuest Cobra HD. I believe it was around $350. Works like a charm. I've reformatted dozens of times, stored a few hours worth of DV on it, ran OS X off of it for awhile (when the HD in my iMac went dead), and many other things. It is very fast and extremely reliable. I'd highly recommend it. Good Luck

[SwarmyCurve]

I had a Pismo Powerbook, with a 12 gig drive. This past Sunday I ordered a Firewire HDD from owcomputing.com. It arrived Tuesday at 9:30 am! The shipping was incredibly fast considering I paid for 2nd day service from Airborne Express. The model is their Mercury Elite HDD at 7200 rpm and 80 gig capactiy. At only 219$ it also happens to be one of the cheapest drives at 80 gigs and the high rotating speed. It has been working perfectly. Its a very nice company, they email you the notification that it shipped and they actually bundle a collection of files on the drive. It has a folder of classic apple commericials, and various utilities. Its very nice and something you would never get on a big name company hdd. Other strong features of the drive are its small size and weight, the fact that it doesnt use a fan, and that it comes bundled with SpeedTools 3.5 which even has a couple of OSX ready utilities.

When you can buy a zippy 80 GB drive (w/8MB cache) for $120 and a FireWire case for about $60-70 more why overspend?