I'm looking into the LaCie hard drives and heard that I want the firewire version over the USB one, why exactly?

Not all computers have USB 2.0 capability. You're safer going with Firewire.

Plus the transfer rate for firewire is greater compared to USB. I use mine for backing up the macs at work before wiping the HD's and I dont think I couldn stand hanging round waiting for USB. The added bonus if you are using a Mac is the firewire 800 port. I love my LaCie HD. 500GB of Beauty!

The only advantage is speed. If you have no time to waste and money to waste then go firewire.

Nonono.... do not use USB 2.0 to deal with video. Only tragedy can result. It technically has a faster speed than Firewire, but it is unable to maintain that speed. The result will be dropepd frames during capture, and laggy playback from time to time. It's strongly recommended by everyone who works with digital video that you avoid USB 2 like the plague.

Also, steer clear of LaCie drives. They're beginning to develop quite a bad rap. I've had one fail, corrupting dozens of hours of video, known friends to have catastrophic failures, and heard bad stuff about them in general. The ports are weakly built, and become loose over time, resulting in random disconnects, and data loss.

G-TECH by G-RAID is a fantastic line of drives (knock on wood), and I've only heard of minor hardware failures on those, like the power switch. Their support people are fantastic. Also, Wiebetech is highly recommended by weird nerdy people who know these things.

I don't know. For the past eight years I've used nothing but LaCie drives and I've never had a single one fail on me, and pretty much everyone I know uses them and I've never heard any of them complain or have any problems. They're certainly the most dependable drives I've ever used.

The only LaCie drive to avoid is the Porsche. Stick with the d2.

Very true about the porsche. I guess the moral of this story is that it all depends quite a bit on luck.

I'm new here, but I couldn't help stopping in on this discussion. I've had two very important LaCie drives fail on me in the last couple of years. One was my terabyte drive, and the other was more recent, a 250 GB d2 drive. In fact, the only drives I've had fail have been LaCie drives. What really poured salt on the wound, was the crappy customer service I received. I had to send my drive all the way across the country, so I was without it for about a week or so all together. Then, when it came back, it still didn't work. I then asked for my money back, because I was in the middle of redigitizing my video that was on that drive onto a new drive that I had to go out and buy. They should have just sent me another drive, or refunded my money. Either way, as a result of these experiences I'll never buy another product from Lacie, and I'm very glad to have been able to vent in this forum. I currently have two of those Western Digital Bookend things, and they've performed flawlessly. I don't necessarily mind things going wrong, It's how I'm treated afterward that counts, and LaCie failed with flying colors.

GRAID drives are the way to go. They're built for video editing and they're tanks.

They're expensive - but worth every penny.

http://www.g-technology.com/

Thanks!