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i was an idiot and bought one of those seagate freeagent pro drives a while back. It works great, though it goes into auto sleep mode after ONE MINUTE of inactivity. that sucks when you go to reposition a mic, come back and hit play, only to see a spinning beach ball while the drive "wakes up". apparently in windows you can fix this, but in mac, it's not even an option. sucks "balls" pun intended.

I would just get a lacie, or something along those lines. big studios will sometimes sell hard drives to consumers but they are a bit pricey. (i've used them and they rock, though, it's worth the cash.) dont buy seagate freeagent drives though, they're a headache.

You might look into the Rocstor drives they have the 924 chipset
firewire 800 400 usb and ata I belive I use the av 800 and 850
drives. And they have been working great. modest price as well
And avalible right here at RSPE check it out.
PS dont forget to partion!!!

Once again esata is the way to go. I know I know Digi doesnt "officially support it" they are kind of slack when it comes to new hardware architecture.

Here is the deal use an Antec external sata case and drive of choice. The case comes with a pci slot plate with connection for the drive case. On the interal side is a sata cable that goes directly to the sata on the motherboard.

Since all new pc and mac hardware are goning this route alot of you are using sata aready. I know all the new mac stuff is and most pc and pc board manufacturers are.

This is the exact same connnection, cable, transfer protocol, bit exchange, architecture so on and so on as sata.

What you are doing is extending one of our hard drives outside the case the only differnce is it has its own power supply. This is good because its not taxing your computers power supply.

Mac is already AHCI ready, XP can be moded with Microsoft Mass Storage Matrix.

With sata or esata, same diff, you can get the industry standard 3gds throught put (trust me it smokes IDE, Pata, ata, usb, firewire 400/800)its rock solid, portable, and fassssssssssssst. Takes alot of overhead off the memeor and cpu.

You can tr or not at our liesure. But by this time next year you will be either extremely pleased or upgrading to sata/esata.

Buy the way I have used a Lacie, and a couple of other EHDs and this Antec case with WD 500GB cost half what a lacie cost and literaly smokes the others ive used.

Enjoy

Hi Karma,
Well, I was in your shoes about a couple of months ago. I'm an Audio student attending an Audio Technical School and had spoken w/ 1 of the Digital Audio instructors about suggestions on using a good external HardDrive. His suggestion was to purchase a "LaCie" which is great for audio. Matter of fact, prior to this conversation I had just bought a "Western Digital" and had to re-sell it on Craigslist b/c he had said that "Western Digital" is ONLY good for DATA Storage and NOT an External that you could actually record on using a FireWire Connection INSTEAD of a USB which I used on the "Western Digital". By the way, the "LaCie" that I bought was the 500 Gigs one which I think would hold up A LOT of space.
Anyway, I hope this helps if you haven't gotten that much responses (plus, I just signed up as a member to this website just a few minutes ago and thought I could be of any help).

Mona

Hi Mona. I didn't see what interface you're using. If it's anything "M-", I wouldn't suggest using firewire to connect to the external drive. LaCie is very good hardware with an excellent track record. Also, Maxtor's 1TB is affordable and as fast as USB2.0 get; Likewise, I just added an Iomega and was actually able to use the Firewire 800 interface will runing an maudio Profire (it's 400). But, this overloaded the whole fireware bus right away. I just plugged in a little Western Digital 250 over USB2.0 and it was fine. I have no idea what the issue was.

I just bought one from Other World Computing
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

I got the 320 GB, 7200 rpm, FireWire 400/800/USB 2.0