How Should An External Hard Drive Be Attached?

Ask a Pack Rat:

Another great question in my mailbox:

I bought a 3rd SATA drive, and have nowhere to put it in my PowerMac G5. I forgot there was only room for 2 inside!

I do audio recording: Lots of Digital Performer, plus a bit of Pro Tools. I recently bought a new 1 TB Hitachi drive and don’t know how to house it.

Here are my choices:

1. External FW400 enclosure
2. External FW800 enclosure
3. External USB2 enclosure
4. PCIe SATA card (expensive because I’d still need to buy an enclosure?)

I’m hearing that the unused FW800 socket on the back isn’t a good idea. True?

I have a Digi002r Firewire Audio interface attached to one FW400 port, and a PCIe MOTU 424e card (with the other audio interfaces attached) installed.

Thank you much for any help.

Stephen’s Stance

My preference is to rank them in terms of performance and cost:

1. eSATA
2. FW800
3. FW400
4. USB

I don’t know much about the G5 but guess that a PCIe eSATA card won’t be too expensive. The enclosures are cheap too.

A better option might be a Drobo (on FireWire 800) if you have the cash. It’s not super fast (though the new Drobo S is faster) but it protects your data and it’s easy to add more space. With that many drives, you’re likely to have a failure soon… The only issue here is that an empty Drobo costs a few hundred dollars and that might be out of your price range.