Purchasing Western Digital My Book

[Cory Mckechnie]

Thanks for such an in-depth response Ben, you’ve certainly given me much to consider and I actually think I’m going to take some time and actual re-consider what I need to buy.

My first instinct is to go with the G-SATA and use the drives separately and manually backup to the second drive as needed, but the fact that the SATA card doesn’t work with Leopard at this time really takes that option away (I just ordered one of the new Mac Pro’s just released which will obviously come with Leopard).

The G-Speed ES is out of my price range, so that’s not an option and while I don’t need mobility, I just kind of liked the idea of having an external solution. I have two older Western Digital Caviar 120GB SATA drives that will take up two of the remaining three drive spaces in the new tower.

I might actually be best to get a 500GB or 1TB internal SATA drive and use whatever savings on something else that will be needed to get this new system up and running … there’s certainly never a shortage of goodies to buy when your re-building an edit suite 🙂

Thanks again for all the help … now I guess i’ll go have a look at internal SATA drives and see what’s available 🙂

Cory

[Dan Yu]

Hi Cory,
The only thing G-SATA does, just wraps two drives together in an external enclosure. It needs two SATA cables to connect two eSATA ports to your workstation, because it doesn’t have the port-multipler technology. Simply, the RAID system is simulated by Disk Utility in your operation system and the SATA adapter is basically just an I/O port.
Personally, I have two G-SPEED eS and they are pretty expensive. They do have the port-multipler technology built-in in G-SPEED eS but it still works as a software RAID controller. Here is a short video for you to understand, the difference between Software RAID and Hardware RAID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4WjVJIJqdI Hope that you would find my experience helpful for you.

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[Cory Mckechnie]

Thanks to all for your help in this purchasing decision. Based on everyone’s insightful comments and re-considering my needs and budget, I decided to go for the Seagate 750GB BARRACUDA 7200.11-SATA 32MB CACHE 3.5. This will do my needs for my current project and if I need a different solution, I will probably get something from G-Technology. Until then, my Segate drive is on its way.

I should also mention, the decision was made quickly as when I checked out the Dell site, they had they 750GB on for $169.99 so I snapped it up – https://accessories.dell.com/sna/products/Internal_Hard_Drives/productdetail.aspx?c=ca&l=en&cs=cadhs1&sku=A1370886 … you can pick up two 750GB drives for $70 less than the cost of one of the 1TB drive. I think the deal ends today though, so any takers should head on over quickly.

Thanks again all.