FW800 and eSATA
I'm pretty happy with using FW800 and eSATA I have to say.
The speeds are great.
eSATA obviously is very fast. It is about 2x as fast as FW800 from my personal experience, although of course it is listed as technically being much faster. However, to use eSATA on my MacBook Pro, I am using this eSATA Thunderbolt Hub from LaCie:
My drives are a wonderful form factor for travel, the are the same size and shape as the Hub from LaCie. Here is a link:
LaCie 1TB 7200rpm (very recently discontinued, sadly)
I wish LaCie would not have discontinued the drives, but I am not worried because our friends over at OWC (MacSales) have excellent little drives they call the:
I'll just have to begin purchasing those drives as we expand instead of LaCie's to match my triple 1TB friends.
However, eSATA is not bus powered. So, to use this setup, I power the Hub to do its job, but then also have to power both the attached drives. That's 3 wall warts. :/
So, when I travel with the drives I utilize their FW800 connectivity option. It's not quite as fast as eSATA, but plenty fast in my opinion for doing almost anything I put them through. Even large 95GB folder transfers in the field don't take unreasonably long.
At my desk I don't mind the extra power supplies and cables, so I get the speed of eSATA.
In the field I don't mind the "less-than-turbo" speed of FW800, so I get the portability of bus-powered drives off of a single FW800 cable.
Which is super nice, just like you, for reading all this nerdy information that I put on this blog. :)
thanks for reading!
-Cameron