[TheMule]

Will there be a FireWire 800 adapter for the iMac core duo?

If not, what would be the best way to have and external HD for video editing?

[harrisjamieh]

I dont know if there is a firewire 400 to 800 adaptor, but even if there was, you would still only get firewire 400 speed, so you should get an external drive with firewire 400. The fastest way to connect someting to the iMac is through gigabit ethernet, and I dont know if there are any storage devices out there that use gigabit, but if there are that would be the fastest, however I would imagine they would be expensive

[slugslugslug]

Yeah, if there is something that connects a HD through ethernet, it'd have to be quite a bit more expensive than just a regular ol' HD of the same capacity, since it would have to be running some kind of very reliable networking software. Also, it'd probably show up as a network volume/file server, rather than a plain ol' external drive.

It probably exists, because I'm pretty sure that's what the term NAS refers to, but there's gotta be a pretty hefty premium over a FireWire drive.

I think you should just go for the best-rated FW400 drive you can get (or maybe a 400/800 if you'll be using it with more than one Mac)

[CaptainHaddock]

Something like this Buffalo network drive will give you external storage via a gigabit network. However, they don't quote a transmission speed, so it might not be any faster than Firewire 400 in practice.

This Linksys model advertises 66 MBps, which is about 500 Mbs — slightly faster than FW400 but not up to FW800 speeds.

There are probably some really expensive RAID models that will get you close to 1 Gb.