my next harddrive ( next week)

I have a non profit media literacy and production organization. We recently started a long term project, and have purchaesd a new a imac G5 system . presently using fcp 3. Need to purchase a 250 GB hard drive for next project. Have heard about problems with Lacie hard drives. Sounds like they might be breaking and of little use after a years worth of steady editing. I was told Wiebe tech has a solid system, and to specifically get a wiebetech drive with either a Hitachi or Seagate drive that goes 7200 rpm and has 8mb cache.
Has anyone any sugestions on an upcoming series of hard drive purchase I forsee making in the coming months.

right now i have two of these:
[promax.com]

ive had them daisychained to the rear FW400 port on a number of g3, g4 (powerbooks and towers) and a couple of g5's running since os9 and since fcp v2 and in over 4 years ive never had a single drive related issue

ive used a handfull of these with stellar results as well (and its a FW800 drive):
[promax.com]

ive not tried these, but based on my pervious success with the vendor, id confidently reccomend them:
[promax.com]

LaCie seems to like to use Maxtor drives inside their enclosures and they have a very bad reputation lately.

I like to build my own Firewire devices since you can pick the enclosure and when purchasing an internal IDE/ATA disk drive you will get the full three year (or 5 year for Seagate) warranty instead of the reselers one year warranty.

If you are handy with installing hardware, check out www.macsales.com for their GTech looking Firewire enclosures. They are good loooking and OWC has great tech support, along with good prices.

Thanks wayne . john, i well may like to create my own firewire devices. this next drive is a 250 gb fw drive . can you suggest all the components i would need to get to assemble a working unit.

There is realy only two major things to purchase. First purchase an IDE/ATA disk drive of your choice. I would advise you to stay away from Maxtor, but I have used Western Digital and Seagate equally well. The larger Hitachi drives use more than 3 platters which create more rotational heat, but are very good drives as well.

I mentioned that the Seagate drives cost a little more but give you a 5 year warranty.

Then choose a Firewire enclosure that has the cable, power brick and any other add on tools as part of the package. For bare enclosures, I really like Other World Computing (OWC) offerings for price and quality.

OWC has new 400 and 800Mbps enclosures that match the G5 look.

If you want to save a little green, look around for deals (I just found a Seagate 300 GB IDE drive for $179.00 with $50.00 rebate) or just buy from www.macsales.com as they have very good prices.

As a further note, I just checked www.tigerdirect.com and they have a Seagate 250 GB ATA-100/IDE disk drive for $129.00 with a $50.00 rebate.

$79.00 for a 250 GB drive is a very good deal.

many thanks John.