External firewire hard drive to go with Mac Mini.

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.

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 erased or damaged) and also from theft, fire, flood, lightning, hurricane, tsunami, earth quake, wild dogs and mother in-law.

Would appreciate if people limit their posts to my original question and about the Seagate drive.