FIREWIRE HARDDRIVE

[Wisegi]

HI Everyone....

I'm typically a PC user but with my family business being in the printing industry, the standard is pretty much MACs...

I'm looking at adding probably a firewire harddrive to act like a central server where all the documents would be stored rather then on the cpu's harddrives. Can anyone provide me some info on doing this? Any particular brand of harddrive? am I looking for a harddrive with a firewire enclosure or what? I have both a G3 and a G4 which has the firewire built in... both computers are networked through my router so that they can see each other....

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thx

 

[warpdrve]

I have a plain old ordinary firewire hard drive housing and have actually swapped out a few standard IDE hard drives in the unit and have had no problem reading the drive on my iMac DV 400 (OS X Panther). Actually, I recently went through the exercise of swapping out my internal 10 gb hard drive for a 30 gb drive and stuck the 10gb in the external. Everything works great so it really shouldn't make much of a difference what type of drive you get.

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[jmgalvin]

Just go to

http://www.owconputing.com.

They have a large selection with many options - at a very fair price.

All you have to do is plug in a FW drive to a mac and it will mount. Nothing else is necessary.

IMPORTANT. Buy one that is dual Firewire-USB. If anything happens to the firewire interface, the machne can be plugged into the usb connection on the mac anb you're back in business. I once ruined the FW interface on an outboard dirve by installang an OSX update without disconnecting the drive, not bother to reasd the Apple warning ahead of time. Luckily, I could plug into usb and be back in business in a minute or so.

 

[whit3rd]

Putting the drive in a firewire enclosure will slow it down. It's just as easy to
put a second hard drive in one of your computers (probably the G4) and
share out only that one volume; it'll be available to any user on the
network.

Because sleep will turn off the Firewire port, shared Firewire disks have a
habit of disappearing and needing to be re-mounted.

At the high end, a pair of hard drives configured as a RAID 1 pair will give
redundancy (this is supported in software for OS X) in case of a failure.
Some G4s have space for two or more extra drives.