External firewire hard drive to go with Mac Mini.

Dracule1,
I don't know what drives WD puts in their "black boxes". I only have access to "raw" drives from manufacturers. In general, especially light home use, any of their drives should be fine. Same for most manufacturers.

Rbstehno, thanks suggesting the Seagate. I was interested in the Free Agent 2 TB HD, but there seems to be a problem with Free Agent drives and Macs. Specifically, there is an Amazon review by a guy who bought this drive for his Mac. Here is A. Leong's review on May 31, 2010:

"Do not buy this drive if you use sleep/ hibernate on your mac. I bought two of these to house my media library and to serve as a backup drive for my Mac Mini in my living room. First the positives: this drive is fast. I didn't have any problems with delay when I accessed data on the drive (iTunes library, movies, pictures). It's also quiet. It's fanless so no distraction when listening to music. The light on the bottom is anoying, but tollerable. Now for the big problem: if the drive goes into hibernate, it will not wake up, freezing you computer and forcing a hard reboot. With the updated firmware from Seagate, it takes about 15 min on inactivity. I used an applet to constantly ping it so that it wouldn't sleep. That was fine except if your mac goes to sleep, it will also hiberate this drive. Somehow, the time machine drive would still sleep everyday and freeze the mini, as a result. So, in short, if you're the kind of user who boots up your computer, does what you need to do, and then shuts it down, these are the drives for you. If you leave your computer on for any period of time, don't buy these."

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-FireWire-External-ST320005FJA105-RK/product-reviews/B002DW94WS/ref=cm_cr_pr_recent?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Have you had any problem like this?

WD formerly made everything from the silicon in there own wafer fabs to manufacture of complete drives. This was over a decade ago. Now? They probably buy other peoples chipsets. I worked for 'em for over a decade.

I like the idea behind the dual drive externals w/firewire 800 for Mac. When I build one, it'll probably be just a single drive for backup, but if cost were no object.....some kind of Raid5 would be in order.

I know its been a while, but for the last drive I replaced I used an IBM / Hitachi drive which was very quiet.

Thanks to above tips for external enclosures.....I could only find a few firewire models and they didn't appeal.

Anyone have any problem with the Seagate drive and Macs like the guy I posted about above?

Magfan - I found out that Fantom uses Micronet drives 7k rpm. Firewire is only 400 (same on my Mac Mini). Firewire 800 might have some use for file transfer but not for the music server since Firewire 400 is already about 300 times faster that CD data stream (150KB/s). Firewire does not involve main CPU in file transfer as much as USB.

I'm not a big fan of Raid. The way it is executed in Dell computers (stripping) increases only disk performance creating additional hazard (one fails = all fail). Mirroring offers protection but only in case of disk failure and not from the virus or OS going crazy.

I keep three 1TB identical drives (copies) - one in use, one in safe and one at work. That way I'm protected if something happens during copying (both damaged) and also from theft, fire, flood, lightning, hurricane, tsunami, earth quake, wild dogs and mother in-law.