External Disk

[Virtualbody1234]

Yup. Thats clear as mud.

I agree with you.

[{I}{K}{E}]

I've seen 500GB USB2 drives by LaCie for about £115 (€170) plus VAT.
If you want Firewire 800 that pushes the price up by over 50%.

1TB drives are about £350 (€510), so it really is important to decide if you need the capacity, but those drives have the Firewire 800 option.

Note - these are desktop drives so they are not intended to be carried around as portable storage.

Why are fireware HDs more expensive?

[limesqueezer]

Im now just wondering until i have the chance, would it be better to format my new external disk into NTFS, that was bought formatted in FAT32 ?

[zapjb]

Yes

[lynx]

I've seen 500GB USB2 drives by LaCie for about £115 (€170) plus VAT.
If you want Firewire 800 that pushes the price up by over 50%.

1TB drives are about £350 (€510), so it really is important to decide if you need the capacity, but those drives have the Firewire 800 option.

Note - these are desktop drives so they are not intended to be carried around as portable storage.

Why are fireware HDs more expensive?

The hardware required to implement firewire is slightly more expensive (but only about $2), and there were also royalty payments ($0.25) to Apple and other patent holders. I don't know if they still demand those payments, but even if they don't you can bet the manufacturers add quite a bit on to the price just in case.

Part of the increased cost is that when you get firewire you get both interfaces, and presumably some sort of logic chip to connect the interface to either firewire or USB.

There's absolutely no reason why the cost should rise in proportion to the disk size. There should be an extra cost for the additional interface and that should be carried throughout the range. In practice they price the product in line with "what the market will stand".