What a great way to spend the week-end: shopping for an external hard drive! And that's because we are running out of disk space to store all the videos we are producing. Currently attached to our Macs are a multitudes of external drives including 2 Firewire disks, the 1TB Maxtor One Touch III and a 500 GB Maxtor One Touch 4 (OT4) Plus, plus three smaller 160 GB USB drives when we are on-the-go, a 80 GB Buffalo drive and a very old Linksys 40 GB Gigadrive which is probably on its last leg. Actually, we're going to aggregate all our video content in a small box that can host 4 to 8 internal 3"5 1 TB drives. Seagate has the Barracuda and Western Digital the Caviar.
But for now, we need a 500GB+ external drive! I finally went for the 750 GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 which was at $219+tx at Fry's and Best Buy and $10 more at Circuit City. But overall it's hard to say who's really the cheapest. I found the SimpleTech 120GB portable drive at $90 at Circuit City, $100 at Office Depot. But the 160GB OT4 mini was $5 cheaper at Office Depot and a "whopping" $10 less (every penny counts!) at OfficeMax compare to Circuit City. Best Buy had a good deal ($280+tx) for Western Digital's 1TB My Book Essential 2.0 which lacked the Firewire interface of the Maxtor drive though.
Now I'll probably spend my next week-end shopping for a drive bay... any recommendations?