External Hard Drive Issues & Questions

[William Hofius]

This is really a two part message. One part trouble-shooting advice, 
and one part purchasing advice.

Part One:
I recently purchased a WesternDigital 120GB FireWire & USB 2.0 external 
hard drive. My main purpose for buying the drive was to use it to 
capture digital video and to use it as a scratch disk for editing 
video. I bought it primarily to work with digital video on my 1GHz 
PowerBook G4 (so I could take large projects back and forth to work) 
but would also use the drive with my 450MHz DP PowerMac G4.

This is a speedy and quite drive and it worked right our of the box 
with OS X 10.2.8. (According to the instructions from WesterDigital, 
the Mac OS would not recognize the drive until it had been reformatted 
for Mac OS. However, the drive was viable from the get-go. I did 
reformat the drive to HFS+ though before using it to work with digital 
video.)

Because my PowerBook has only one FireWire port, if I am using the 
external hard drive, I need to connect the digital video camera to the 
second FireWire port on the hard drive.

When I did this, both iMovie 3 and Final Cut Express recognized both 
hard drive and camera. From these apps, I could set the drive as the 
source for capture and scratch files, save files to the drive, and read 
media files from the drive. From these apps, I could control the 
camera—play, rewind, fast-forward, stop, pause—and I could view footage 
from the camera.

However, in each and every instance I attempted to capture video, each 
app would capture a few frames of video and then freeze. The freeze 
would be so deep that it would hose the Finder and the only way to 
revive the PowerBook was to forced restart.

Is this a problem with the external hard drive? (A cheap FireWire 
bridge or controller for example.) Is this an issue with having a 
single FireWire port? Is the issue resolvable?

Part Two:
I bought the WesternDigital hard drive because it was cheap. It was on 
sale for $219 then came with $100 in rebates. Maybe this was a mistake.

Anyway, I was seeking advice and opinions on external hard drives. I 
like the lower prices, larger drive sizes, and faster performance of 
the desktop-sized external hard drives. At the same time, I appreciate 
the smaller physical sizes and weights of notebook-sized external hard 
drives. But these smaller drives are so slow and so expensive!

So what do all of you use for external hard drives? Any recommendations 
for a desktop vs notebook? Any drives that have exceptional quality and 
reliability? Anything manufacturers or resellers I should avoid like 
the black death?