Firewire Hd: 400 Or 800?!?, External hard drive Options

[kd_rome]

Hi guys!
I need to buy an external hard drive to use with Protools and my powerbook 17" 1.5 GHz.
I would like to know what do you think about the differences between a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320GB with a Firewire 800 - Oxford 912-8Mb and a
Maxtor OneTouch™ II - 300GB with a Firewire 400 - Oxford 911-16 Mb.

Everytime a read a review it's always about people that use the hd for pro video/photo, I would like to know something about the ProAudio needs.
Thanks!

[ourmanflinty]

umm, one big file as in the barefeats tests shown doesn't completely convince me that it's good for audio, obviously the drive can take a lot of data, the manufacturer states 56 to 29 Mbytes/sec sustained which will use up a fw400 bus and more! 50MB/sec theoretical and 32 or above in the real world. I don't usually copy many big single files over, any paparazzi or video editors on here?
That's a 3 platter 6 head drive, if you went for the 60GB option you're down to 1 platter 2 heads, read the datasheet, and one third of the data rates he saw in his test. Now how many can you get on a fw400 bus?

If you talk about track count then you are recording or playing back lots of seperate files to a drive, with edits perhaps and other data in the bitstream, faster spinning more platters and more heads make a difference. I expect that drive may achieve 60+ 44.1 16 bit tracks but I'd like to see some track count based firewire comparison tests wouldn't you??