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External Hard Drive Recommendations Please!

slackersonly said:
your link is bad. take out the ')' at the end.
is this one of those long island new your electronics stores that quotes low prices and never honors them?
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B&H Photo Video is one of the largest photo equipment retailers in the US. They are Apple certified representatives. I'm a B&H customer since 1995 and never had a problem, and they shure honor their prices. Here is the direct link to the Lacie d2 320GB: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/con...s&Q=&sku=399061&is=REG&addedTroughType=search
and the 250GB: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/con...s&Q=&sku=399060&is=REG&addedTroughType=search
 
A related question:

I want an external HDD to store my media on and access it via front row. Will USB 2.0 be fine for playing movies off of, or am I going to want firewire?

I've been seriously considering the Western Digital My Book, as the design is nice and I like that it turns on and off with your computer. The Firewire/USB version is significantly more expensive than the USB only version.
 
I find it really strange that so many have had problems with LaCie.
Where I live the local macstore only sells LaCies and I know many that have had LaCie disks. I've had a LaCie d2 extreme 250 GB for 2 years now, not a single problem. Two frinds of mine bougth external HDs the same time, one Maxtor 1-touch and a Western Digital Media Centre, both have died.

Maybe it's just a series of luck, but all I know with LaCies have been happy owners.

If I would buy a new drive today I would buy a LaCie again, just because i've been very satified with both performance, quality and looks of the d2s.

And btw, according to systemprofiler my d2 is a maxtor drive :)
 
I bought a WD MyBook a few weeks back and its a superb piece of kit. I've used it without problem on PCs and Macs, it comes with USB and Firewire ports and also have some nifty backup software included.

highly recommended.
 
ascender said:
I bought a WD MyBook a few weeks back and its a superb piece of kit. I've used it without problem on PCs and Macs, it comes with USB and Firewire ports and also have some nifty backup software included.

highly recommended.
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Thanks, that's great to hear! I have one on order in the UK. The price I got it for really does not warrant buying an enclosure (especially as firewire ones are hard to come by) and a drive.

Have you cracked the morse code yet? The vent holes are morse code that apparently spell out something.
 
ieani said:
Any company that makes a drive that fails as much as that one does cannot be trusted.

BTW, it might not really matter but I added an external hdd question and answer to the FAQ im trying to do.
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I have used about 6 external lacie drives and i had no problems what so ever. I have a LAN in my house with about 12 PC's and a few macs and i use only lacie external drives. I could not be happyer.
 
eSATA is the future

I think "eSATA" is the future of external drives. It is so good that I won't miss Firewire 800. I hope the new Mac Book Pros have it standard rather than requiring an expansion card. It will be excellent for Time Machine backups.

USB 2.0 is about 3 times slower than FW 400 when I backup my hard drive but I do like the low price of the enclosures that are USB only. I use those for my smaller 80 GB drives and saving and retrieving a few files rather than massive backup operations.
 
BornAgainMac said:
I think "eSATA" is the future of external drives. It is so good that I won't miss Firewire 800. I hope the new Mac Book Pros have it standard rather than requiring an expansion card. It will be excellent for Time Machine backups.

USB 2.0 is about 3 times slower than FW 400 when I backup my hard drive but I do like the low price of the enclosures that are USB only. I use those for my smaller 80 GB drives and saving and retrieving a few files rather than massive backup operations.
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How could i go about buying an eSATA drive and use it with my mac pro for m huge movie collection plus backsups?
 
Locatel said:
If you open up a Lacie d2 you'll find a Seagate drive inside it!!! If you build your own external drive with a Seagate drive, the advantage is that it has a 5 year warranty X 1 year Lacie warranty. A 250GB Seagate + good enclosure does not cost much less than a Lacie d2 triple interface 250GB, $155 at www.bhphotovideo.com. The savings will be around $20 the most.
Seagate lovers beware!!! Inside a Lacie beats a Seagate hart!!!:D
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Lacie just buys whatever drives are cheap at the time. When you buy a LaCie, you really can't choose which HD you get inside other than the capacity. The brand of HD won't be known until you open it up, hence the different responses you're going to get. Anyway, with LaCie, you're just paying for brand and their nice case. Whether that case is better than the other nice enclosures out there is another question. They are nice looking though.

LaCie also uses Maxtors quite often. ;)
 
any experiences with this drive...

External Hard Drive FireWire 800/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 250GB, Black Series,
Iomega, $240
Pros: Fast; triple interface; includes Retrospect Express; bootable via FireWire in OS X.
Cons: None significant.
Issue reviewed: October 2005
 
Thank You!

Thanks so much for this thread. I'm a new MacBook Pro owner (1st time Mac user) and purchased 3 200GB Maxtor internal drives a few months ago when Staples was doing a major rebate deal on 'em. (Yes, now I know that I should have thought twice before going with Maxtor...) Final price: $50 each. One's sitting in my Windows machine, and I'm going to turn at least one of the others into an external drive for my laptop to make video editing a bit easier. Not sure about the other drive yet. Maybe just a backup...

Anyway, thank you! I was wondering about firewire vs. usb only, and this helps.

I have a related question (about how to format the drive if I want to be able to use it with Windows XP machines, too), but I'll search around a bit first to see if it's already been answered somewhere here.
 
Answering my own question

It looks like FAT32 is what I should go with if I want to be need to read & write from both Mac & Windows. But since I'll be using it for video editing & may end up with 4+GB files, I'll probably just format it for the Mac & keep a small FAT32 partition so that I can put Macdrive on it if I need to... though I really wouldn't want to have to install Macdrive every time I wanted to access it from a new Windows box.

Ah, who cares. :) I'm using it with the Mac. If I really need to transfer a file to the PC, I'll do it over the network or put it on DVD-ROM...
 
slackersonly said:
6. Enclosure chipset does matter but you will pay for it. MacSales.com sells enclosures with the Oxford chipset starting at $60. Enclosures with 'slower' chipsets can be found as low as $20.
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This is the only part I'm fuzzy on at this point. I'm going for something with both USB & Firewire (since I'll be doing video work on it). How do I know if it's a "good" chipset if I'm buying something from, say, NewEgg? Do I just need to ask for "the Oxford chipset," whatever that is? :)

Thanks!
 
richschmidt said:
It looks like FAT32 is what I should go with if I want to be need to read & write from both Mac & Windows. But since I'll be using it for video editing & may end up with 4+GB files, I'll probably just format it for the Mac & keep a small FAT32 partition so that I can put Macdrive on it if I need to... though I really wouldn't want to have to install Macdrive every time I wanted to access it from a new Windows box.

Ah, who cares. :) I'm using it with the Mac. If I really need to transfer a file to the PC, I'll do it over the network or put it on DVD-ROM...
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I think I'll partition mine when I get my drive. Basically give OS X a nice big HFS formatted partition but also have a 50G or so FAT32 partition that I can use in Windows.
 
Depends what you want

I'd agree with the general consensus bulleted list. Having had Maxtor and LaCie, I'd go with most of what's been said.

I think you've got to consider redundancy if you're using external hard drives as storage. I got a Lacie 500Gb back when it cost an arm a kidney & a leg, and having that die on me was quite painful. Saying goodbye to a music/picture/video collection...

NAS might be something to consider, and I'd recomend at least looking at what it offers. I'm currently running on external Maxtor drives with no problems so far (and with fingers crossed after reading reviews of them). USB 2.0 is ok if you're using them more for storage; the better drives have Firewire 400/800 and you can get a 400/800 card if you want fast data movement to from the drive.

In terms of backing up, I can't say I use Retrospect on the Maxtor, but the one button solutions on bigger drives are probably the way to go unless you want to buy your own software to do backups/you're going to get Leopard/Vista. Backing up regularly(read daily)/overnight saves your computer chuntering along in the background whilst you're trying to work (and the same can be said about defragmenting - Don't leave backing up or defragging for too long, as it's just a few minutes every day, or hours and hours if you leave it. (Ever tried to defrag 100s/100s of Gb not well looked after? :/ )

Perpendicular storage and flash based drives are coming out soon, so I'd expect that to flow to external drives soon. Go for as much as you can get. My rule of thumb is to give an external drive 4 years max before it becomes a data loss liability. Others may disagree, but I'd rather wipe it and resell it.
 
miles01110 said:
Agreed. 4 years on a Maxtor might be pushing it :)
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Don't forget to factor in how long it'll take to move stuff off a disc before it fails, if you aren't fully backing up too!

4 years might very well be pushing it - was last time ;) The way the increase in drive sizes are moving, I'll just bite the bullet and move it on to a multiTb NAS in a few years time.
 
just buy a external enclosure (something from the Vantac line) and a hard drive (IDE/Sata) and jsut put them together it would be alot cheaper and you can save money and not spend a fortune on premade external drives.

go to newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com
 
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