Thinkpads Forum

I'm looking to use an external drive as a scratch disk in Photoshop (as well as for extra storage space). I'm thinking that a Firewire 800 drive will be much more effective than a USB 2.0 drive for this purpose.

Can someone recommend some good Firewire 800 products? I have already read the comments in this thread:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... t=firewire


So now,

1. I need a Firewire 800 port. The Lacie Firewire PCMCIA (cardbus) card is recommended by forum member RonS, who says he can reach 64MBytes/sec with it. Alternatives would be an expressCard card. (Or maybe dropping Firewire 800 altogether and going with eSATA.)

2. I need a Firewire 800 drive. Should I get a retail package or drive+enclosure? In terms of a retail package, I found a well-reviewed unit in the Western Digital My Book Pro (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136047)


Any opinions?

Go eSata all the way. Much higher bandwidths, even on the lowend 1.5gbps cards, and you can end up running drives natively, without any conversion taking place. So instead of IDE>USB>bla you are going SATA>SATA. This also helps reduce cpu load, and will probably make you happier overall.