I finally purchased two external drives at Best Buy from a guy with a Mac certified badge... he told me the compact My Passports by Western Digital were just as good as the larger ones.  The one we have processing now is the 'My Passport for Mac' 500 gb.  Its overkill for our 160 gb hd on our power pc, but was the smallest they had in stock.  Anyway, you know we have Leopard, we unhooked our Lacie and started this backup of the whole drive yesterday late afternoon and it is still going..... Is it the HD or our computer? Thought it was strange there is no external ac outlet for the passport like there was for the lacie and wonder if that slows it down any...
Thanks for any help.

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The Mypassport drive is a 2.5" hard drive as opposed to the 3.5" desktop type of drive inside a Lacie "upright" external hard drive. Comparing the two types of drives, 2.5" vs. 3.5" I would say the 3.5" out performs the smaller drive in every way. The smaller drive (passport for example) relies on the USB bus for power as well as throughput. Usually you're going to get firewire 800 on an external vs. 480 on the USB port. And that's not 480 megabits throughput consistant as it is with firewire. Next thing to consider, the fragile nature of smaller 2.5 drives. These things die way more often that 3.5's due purely to the fact that they are moved around much more often. I don't trust my data on any 2.5" drive. But then again, I don't trust any hard drive. When you're data is in at least 2 places then you're better off. 3 places is even better. Lastly, the price comparision between the two types of drives leans you toward the 3.5". You almost always get more space for less money with the 3.5's.


As far as time machine taking that long to back up, several hours is normal but over night and still going on less than 160 gigs of data. That doesn't seem correct.