The last external harddisk I bought privately was an IOMEGA 750 GB with all the alternatives for ports on it. I am very happy with it. That one is partitioned into 2 halves, one housing my Mac Book backup, the other housing my iMac backup. The original plan for that disk was not for backup, but for working (and I used it until recently for startup disk for various betas I didn't want to mix with my regular stuff)and for scratch.

But along came the Mac Book alu (2,4 GHz) at work which replaced my black MacBook (2,16 GHz). Not my choice, but that was what we got (I would have preferred the new Mac Book Pro alu WITH FW). (We are also going to combine those with iPhones instead of regular SonyEricsson mobiles and regular phones before March - around 700 iPhones we are talking about - we are becoming entirely mobile, except for the editors which will get iMac 24" instead of the present old G5s).

We (the Helpdesk of Scandinavias largest daily newspaper) are trying out the MacBook alus before we swop all the current MacBook and MacBook Pro users to them (several hundred users)during the coming spring (when we also switch to Leopard and CS3-CS4, CS3 for the editors (because of plug-in development for the publishing systems we use), CS4 for the photographers probably as they got brand new very advanced CANON cameras recently).

So now my external harddisk for scratches is a meager 160GB LaCie with firewire only (which also houses one backup of my photos in addition to dvds) which I cannto use at all with my Mac Book Alu.

Without the IOMEGA with all the ports on it I would not have been able to migrate my MacBook to the new Mac Book Alu as easily and fast as I did. My collegues struggled with it over the network by wireless hub and Airport for whole days.

Conclusion: if you can find one with both USB2 and firewire all the better for the future. That's what I am looking for personally. But I only see usb 2 ones in all the stores (unless I go to Apple store and pay a lot more than in a regular electronics store like MediaMarkt). The Swedish Apple Store has a IOMEGA 1TB Minimax with both firewire and usb that looks interesting. Reading specs though tells me that USB 2.0 is faster than the firewire 400 in it. FW 800 is not present on all machines. I guess a Western Digital 1TB My Book Studio Edition with both fw400 and 800 and usb 2.0 gives you more for the money. Or a Iomega UltraMax Desktop Hard Drive 750GB And in the long run is a better investment regardless of which machines it will be connected to in the future.

Paolo Rinarelli

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