External Hard Drive Recommendations

[ArtZAngel]

Well, there are consumer hard drives and there are pro-sumer hard drives. LaCie is a consumer hard drive. I have in the past owned several and all but one have failed. When my LaCie's started to go belly up I looked around and setteled on the G-Tech drives (someone had mentioned them earlier: http://www.g-technology.com/ ). I have had four of their drives longer than any of my LaCie's and no problems to date. Many video pros will recommend these for portable storage. Rock Solid. Of course you can't buy them at Best Buy.

Mike

 

[jackkurtz]

I have 8 external hard drives (not counting my Hyperdrive, which is nothing more than a hard drive with a card reader). Four Western Digital My Books, two LaCie drives, one Maxtor and one G Tech. The only drives that have ever failed me are the LaCies. They have been very problematic so I retired them but they're still sitting in my office. I've sort of settled on the WD drives; they fit well in my office workspace, been reliable (so far) and reasonably fast.

But the drive I've been most impressed with is my little G Tech. I got a 100 gig portable with FW400 and USB2 and it rides around with my MacBook. It gets a lot of use, and it has been reliable.

The poster who said all drive fail eventually got it right. Everything on my drives is backed up to DVDs.

jack
--
A few of my photos:
http://web.mac.com/kurtzjack/ or
http://www.sportsshooter.com/members.html?id=4177

 

[nickbaskett]

I noticed a lot of people here saying get the largest drive you can afford. Something you should know is that the bigger capacity drives are more prone to fail reading data. In fact most drives are now using ECC (error checking & correcting) functions all the time. Not to say you shouldn't get a high capacity drive, but if I were you, I would:

• get all your hard drives in a mirrored (redundant) configuration, so if one drive fails, you don't lose everything
• or use a backup service like amazon S3 & jungledisk
• use firewire 800
• or if you have a PCI Express slot consider an external drive cage using using a SATA bus extender. This way, you can have one cage which takes maybe 5 standard drives, which are as cheap as chips. You can plug them in, configure them as say a mirror or RAID configuration for safety, and get speeds possibly faster than if you were running it on your own local internal hard drive (assuming you get some speedy 7200 or 10,000 rpm disks).

I use the Sonnet cage, which is nice, but I wouldn't recommend them, because the mac drivers are crumby. But there are many others to choose from. Whenever I fill a disk up, I pop it out & pop another one in. I can keep the hard drive as its own archive if I like.

If you do go for the standard external HDD type - go firewire & Lacie.

Nick.

 

[Say Cheese]

I noticed a lot of people here saying get the largest drive you can
afford. Something you should know is that the bigger capacity drives
are more prone to fail reading data. In fact most drives are now
using ECC (error checking & correcting) functions all the time. Not
to say you shouldn't get a high capacity drive, but if I were you, I
would:

• get all your hard drives in a mirrored (redundant) configuration,

so if one drive fails, you don't lose everything

• or use a backup service like amazon S3 & jungledisk
• use firewire 800
• or if you have a PCI Express slot consider an external drive cage

using using a SATA bus extender. This way, you can have one cage
which takes maybe 5 standard drives, which are as cheap as chips.
You can plug them in, configure them as say a mirror or RAID
configuration for safety, and get speeds possibly faster than if you
were running it on your own local internal hard drive (assuming you
get some speedy 7200 or 10,000 rpm disks).

I use the Sonnet cage, which is nice, but I wouldn't recommend them,
because the mac drivers are crumby. But there are many others to
choose from. Whenever I fill a disk up, I pop it out & pop another
one in. I can keep the hard drive as its own archive if I like.

If you do go for the standard external HDD type - go firewire & Lacie.

Nick.

This sounds like really good advice, but I'm in way over my head trying to understand it. You are FAR more technically savvy than me. I guess my research should extend beyond "which" hard drive and into a lot of other considerations. Thanks!
--
Gary

http://www.pbase.com/digitalgee

 

[owenleve]

They SUCK as a company, in my opinion. I've had a number of their products crash and burn beyond recovery. They don't put cooling fans inside their units-bad.

Spend the extra money and look into Gtech/Graid drives. They have cooling fans built in. I've run a lacie and these side by side. The Gtech, when running full seed is twice as cool as the lacie that is sitting idle.

heat kills...
--
[email protected]
http://www.gravityhook.com

 

[nole62]

I had a Maxtor drive that died due to overheating. It was still under warranty and they replaced the drive and my Mac tech person put it in an enclosure with a fan. His suggestion was to back up my files and then unmount it and turn it off. This way it doesn't overheat and die. Also got a western Digital Book and do redundant back ups since I lost some very important pictures of my niece's wedding. As the previous poster says: HEAT KILLS