[Rob]

LaCie is certainly a good choice since they have a long history of working well with the Mac platform. They may not be the most economical choice however. It may be cheaper to buy a firewire and/or USB case and put the drive in it yourself.

I think the jury is still out on Panther and Firewire issues. It seems that most of the problems are related to the latest firewire 800 products, but time will tell.

 

[Rob]

Do it yourself external cases are pretty easy to set up. It's no more difficult than installing an internal drive in your computer. You need to set the drive to master in the external case, otherwise it's just plug in the cable and go.

In the Toronto area you can get a Firewire 400 case for under $100. A combo case with Firewire 400 and USB2 will run a little over $100. You can use just about any ATA drive you want. The only issue may be the larger hard drives over 120Gig. I seem to recall some of the older cases may not play nice with large drives.

You can also use the large external cases for CD Burners too.