External hard drives

[ktinkel]

I want to buy an external drive for my new iMac. Trouble is I haven’t bought a drive in years, and have no idea which are better or worse.

MacWorld gave a bunch of stars to the G-Tech G-Drive Q 320GB with a quad interface. If I attached it to the eSATA connector, it has a data transfer rate of 3Gbps, which is pretty astounding. They also make a G-Tech 500GB in the same line ($270 at J&R). I think I want that much storage, but do not know if it is equivalent to the 320GB in quality.

I was also struck by the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB (also $270 at J&R). I would have to reformat this one for the Mac, but that isn’t usually a big deal.

Both of these contain a single 7200 rpm drive. I also saw references to large-capacity HDs with two internal drives, some 7200 and some 5400 rpm, as well as RAIDs. And it would seem prudent to have duplicate ports in case I needed to add another drive sometime, but that may be silly given the capacity of these drives.

What makes sense? I [think I] want to have the OS on the 260 GB internal, probably actually letting the Documents folder work as intended (I have been fighting it all these years). The external would be for backup with partitions for fonts and projects (web sites, for example) that I want to keep handy on the desktop.

I know Marlene asked for advice on hard drives recently, but she needs SCSI and was leaning toward RAID. I am pretty sure I want eSATA and probably do not need RAID but am willing to listen to reason.

Any advice? Experience with these jumbo drives?