MAC external Hard Drive questions

[Evildeadmanwalking77]

Can anybody recommend what kind of external HD to get for my Macbook? It's mainly for my school projects for Computer Art courses in which we use Maya. It consists of alot of animating and 3D modeling and I've heard something about using FireWire? I have no clue what that is since I'm still learning Maya and using a MAC in general. Any info or assistance you guys have on this would be a REAL help to me. Thanks!

[Niode]

Can anybody recommend what kind of external HD to get for my Macbook? It's mainly for my school projects for Computer Art courses in which we use Maya. It consists of alot of animating and 3D modeling and I've heard something about using FireWire? I have no clue what that is since I'm still learning Maya and using a MAC in general. Any info or assistance you guys have on this would be a REAL help to me. Thanks!

If you're doing a lot of work from the drive then you're going to want to get firewire. Since firewire allows for simultaneous read/write. USB is one way only (Key word is Serial) as in you can only read OR write at once halving performance when simultaneous read/write is performed on the drive. I assume it's similar to working from a USB drive for audio. It's practically impossible and certain programs (Pro Tools) simply refuse to use a USB drive as a project folder.

[Evildeadmanwalking77]

Ok, so then Fire Wire is the way to go then? The only brand I keep seeing is Iomega and something about 400 or 800? What does using it as a Time Machine mean? Sorry, like I said, I don't know too much about this.

[Niode]

Ok, so then Fire Wire is the way to go then? The only brand I keep seeing is Iomega and something about 400 or 800? What does using it as a Time Machine mean? Sorry, like I said, I don't know too much about this.

Time machine is the backup system built into OS X from Leopard onwards. It's an automated backup. If you want to use Time Machine make sure that you have enough space to cover your internal drive and then enough space for other work. IE if you have a 150GB internal drive, get a 300GB external and dedicate 50% partition to time machine and the other for your work.

Firewire 400 and 800 will depend on what port you have available. If you have an 800 port then go for an 800 firewire drive as it will perform faster.

The cable on the left is Firewire 400 the one on the right is Firewire 800.

[Anapan]

Doubtful you'd be using your external as a work/temp drive, probably just saving and loading. If that's the case, just get an external USB2 or if possible USB3 (faster than firewire and backward compatible) notebook hard drive. That way you can plug it into any computer. Firewire isn't so universally suported (almost obsolete by now, isn't it?), and the cables are friggin huge and hard to hande/transport. Also you'll have a hard time finding a portable Firewire drive (I bought one a long time ago and it didn't pay off - the USB on it is USB1.1 so it just sucks unless I pull out that huge firewire cord).
If you're worried about speed, many external hard drives have eSATA ports to fix just that. It's a more common connector than firewire lately. You can also get eSATA thumbdrives. I know a lot of laptops have ports for eSATA, tho I don't know about macs.

A little bit overkill, but if you want the fastest, smallest, ruggedized storage, you can get a solid state SATAII drive. They're fast enough to run any operating system (which I don't think *any* thumbdrives, even the eSATA ones can do well). This one will run an OS perfectly, so if you could find an eSATA+USB enclosure for one of these you could get better speed than any thumbdrive or USB-only harddrive you can get.

[Niode]

Doubtful you'd be using your external as a work/temp drive, probably just saving and loading. If that's the case, just get an external USB2 or if possible USB3 (faster than firewire and backward compatible) notebook hard drive. That way you can plug it into any computer. Firewire isn't so universally suported (almost obsolete by now, isn't it?), and the cables are friggin huge and hard to hande/transport. Also you'll have a hard time finding a portable Firewire drive (I bought one a long time ago and it didn't pay off - the USB on it is USB1.1 so it just sucks unless I pull out that huge firewire cord).
If you're worried about speed, many external hard drives have eSATA ports to fix just that. It's a more common connector than firewire lately. You can also get eSATA thumbdrives. I know a lot of laptops have ports for eSATA, tho I don't know about macs.

A little bit overkill, but if you want the fastest, smallest, ruggedized storage, you can get a solid state SATAII drive. They're fast enough to run any operating system (which I don't think *any* thumbdrives, even the eSATA ones can do well). This one will run an OS perfectly, so if you could find an eSATA+USB enclosure for one of these you could get better speed than any thumbdrive or USB-only harddrive you can get.

If you have no experience with Macs and/or OS X then your advice doesn't really apply. You can get eSATA express cards to plug into a Mac and use an eSATA drive (What I do with my Lacie Big Disk Quadra when it's not plugged into my Hackintosh). They aren't standard on any Apple laptop. Also expresscard is only on the new 17" Macbook Pros and no other model.

Firewire cables aren't huge or hard to handle. The thing that you are forgetting here is firewire is a better transfer protocol than USB, purely because it's parallel. This allows it to be used as a temp/working drive due to simultaneous read/write. Something that isn't really possible on USB. Which is what the OP actually wants. Firewire 800 is on every mac produced since the Intel line. There are plenty of portable firewire drives out there (where have you been looking?).

[Anapan]

Yeah, obviously not my area of expertise. I guess I don't know much about mac's solution to high-speed hot plugging so I'll keep out of it.