This weekend I decided to practice what I preach by buying another hard drive for my Power Mac G5 at home. It had a single 160 GB internal hard drive but no backup drive which I tell people never to do, but I was doing it myself. Trusting a single drive with all of my documents, photos and music despite the fact that it is not a matter of if your hard drive will fail but when.

G5 Power Mac The ideal setup would be a second internal hard drive that I could configure as a mirror to the first drive and then an external terabyte firewire drive that I could use for Time Machine backups and additional storage. However, I do not have the budget for a ideal setup. Instead I had about hundred dollars I wanted to spend. CompUSA had some weekend only deals on some Western Digital And Seagate USB 2.0 500 GB external hard drives for only $119 each. However, I would have preferred Firewire connections because they offer better performance. You may be asking how is that possible when USB 2.0 is rated at 480 Mbps and standard Firewire 400 is 400 Mbps? The answer is that differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the sustained throughput.

  • FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer 

  • Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control)

 Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:
 
Read Test:

  • 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
  • 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0

Write Test:

  • 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
  • 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0

This may not be too critical if you are just using the drive for backup, but if you are using it for video editing it makes a big difference and I wanted to keep that option open.

Since the 500 GB external firewire drives started $200 I opted for a $109 internal SATA 320 GB HD. SATA is considerably faster than firewire. An internal drive also doe snot require another power outlet or take up another external port. It is twice the size of the main hard drive which I would as the minimum size for Time Machine if you want to maintain a full system backup with some history.

Installation of the of the internal was the easiest I had ever done on a desktop computer. Apple created a slot that allows you to screw on some rounded bolts that allow the drive to slide in on some rails. The cable connections were right where they needed to and much easier to connect than the older IDE ribbon data and power cables. Upon boot it recognized the drive, I initialized it and told Time Machine to use it and that was it. In a little while I had a full backup of my data.

If you are in the market for an external drive and have a bigger budget than mine, say $200, I would recommend the Lacie d2 Quadra models which four different connection types: eSATA, USB 2.0, Firewire 800 and Firewire 400. Amazon has the 500 GB model listed for $200.80 at the time of this writing. The reason for the multiple connections is that you have greater flexibility in connections if you move the device between multiple computers or want to to insure that it will work on a future computer which is bound to have one of the four options. Lacie has been making external drives for years and have a wide variety of additional models including designer models from Porshe and the Lego inspired stackable brick models in primary colors.

Another brand to consider is G-Technology. They  have not been around as along as Lacie, but they have garnered some very positive reviews from MacWorld and they have some innovative designs including some eSATA fail-safe RAID storage systems. They are more expensive but offer some of the best performance and have designs that  match the PowerMac/MacPro desktop metal grill designs.