[thepirategold]

hello, i'm looking to move overseas and want to leave a
backup hard drive here at home with all my stuff, just in
case i lose my laptop over there or it just dies. i'm not
sure what external hard drives are reliable and
appropriate for my 933mhz G4 iBook running mac os x
panther (10.3.9). i have a 40GB hard drive, so i'm looking
for something that is around 40 or 50GB (a little more
space never hurts, but nothing too over the top) and that
connects via firewire (with the one firewire 400 port on
the laptop). hoping you can bring me up to step with
external hard drives for my machine. thanks!

[SWFan]

Sounds like you're rarely going to use the drive, I would say just buy the cheapest Firewire drive you can find. HD failures either happen immediately, or later after heavy use. So upon buying it, in the first few days if it works it will be good for along time if you're only going to read/write to it a few times a year. About the only manufacturer I'm absolutely against buying is Maxtor.

[Dr. DDS]

And don't forget that this external hard drive may be your backup drive forever. Try superduper, and make some backups as you need because we never know if our HD will have a problem, so a backup is always welcome.