External Firewire 800 Hard Drive Enclosure, options and questions. Options

[SadPandas]

Hello forum,

I have searched through the forum and found some great threads regarding fire wire hard drives but still had a couple more questions. I am doing a project with a friend and he gave me his master recordings on an 80 gig internal maxtor hard drive. I was going to purchase a firewire drive anyway for my audio recording projects since it would be faster than using the 100 gig 5400 enternal hard drive on my power book and was hoping i could use it to back up my powerbook as well. My friends drive gave me the idea of buying an enclosure and using that to get the seperated tracks off of his drive and onto my desktop. From there i was thinking of hot swapping his drive with one of my own and transfering those same tracks onto the newly installed hard drive and working from there. i know this is a gigantic post so thank you for hanging in there with me. Now, the questions: is it possible to use my external firewire drive for working with audio and backing up my powerbook too? Would the speed from the internal hardrive in my powerbook and my external drive be that great of a difference? Can anyone give any suggestions for both enclosure and hard drive? All of my 'rad' gear and software can be found below in my signature. Sorry for the longest post in the history of the interweb and thanks in advance for your time and help.

pandas

This post has been edited by SadPandas: Thu 9 Jun 2005, 10:21

[Narayan]

Hi,
As stated earlier, I am very new to this Mac business. I have got a powerbook G4 1.67Gh 100 GB HDD and 1.5 Gig RAM. I used to have a USB hard drive (IBM travelstar) which I used (still use) with my Fujitsu (C series) note book. But when I plug this into my powerbook, it does not even recognise this drive. The LED in the USB drive lits up though. Do I have to down load some dirvers for this?. Will only powered fire wire external drives work with Macs! I have OS 10.3.9 with the powerbook. Please help.
Narayanan