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good external HD 1TB?

munkees

munkees

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 3, 2005
1,027
1
Pacific Northwest
I guess this is probably will get some good input.

I currently stream from an external HD seagate 500 GB (400 firewire), drive with all my iTunes content, works great, one small problem I have 31GB left on the drive.

I am in the marked for a new external HD, I stream to 3 Apple TV's and 4 apple computers, from one iTunes. I have 3 wireless networks so things just zip along (2 N networks one a 5 GHZ, one a 2.4 GHZ, also a G network for everything else). The iTunes server sits on it own N network, and ethernet connected to the other N network.

Requirements,

I need a reasonable priced 1 TB drive, that runs 24/7? any ideas? Needs to be firewire (800 better, but 400 works just fine), USB cannot handle the traffic. Looking for a drive that does not over heat, or has fans that kick in.

in the passed I have had 2 WD die on me, one 1TB studio (has 2 500GB inside), and the other was a 500 GB studio I got from the Apple store, it would get to hot, until one day started to get into trouble running.

I have had one seagate 750GB, but the 2 firewire ports are fried, USB still works but struggles streaming content.
 
I have several Seagates, both in FreeAgent cases and 3rd party FW800/eSata. The one I have running in an eSATA case has been going 24/7 for about 2 1/2 years on a DirecTV receiver. I have 5 more (4 750GB and 1 1TB) running on FW800 and FW400. They're up and running most of the time connected to my UB MBP.

The latest one is the Seagate FreeAgent Desk Mac 1TB. It has FW800 and is frequently on sale for $139 at Fry's (and, I'm sure other retailers). I'm not exactly sure which model drive it uses, but it's the quietest of the lot. None of them have any spindle noise [to speak of], but I do hear head seeking sounds on a couple of the older drives.

They're all (five) connected to the single FW800 port on the MBP (3x FW800 first, then the two FW400's and a DVD burner last). I've measured (with Activity Monitor) 68MB/s read/write between the 1TB Desk Mac and my internal WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM 320GB (in the MBP).

I keep most of my movies and tv shows on one of the FW400 drives. Most of the time I don't stream to the :apple:tv - it's just the source drive for syncing (I have a 250GB drive in the :apple:tv).

Bottom line - I have nothing but good things to say about the FreeAgent Desk Mac. $139 for a FW800 1TB is a great price, and not too bad a deal at the regular price of $159. I'd be hard pressed to find a case and bare drive for that.
 
An enterprise drive is designed for 24/7 usage and may have additional RAID optimizations.
 
I picked up the Seagate Free Agent 1.5TB at Costco. It's USB 2.0 only, but at $139 and $30 instant rebate I had to give it a try. I reformatted it to HFS+ and started loading it with DVD rips I did with Handbrake in Apple TV quality. It is plugged into my Mac Mini htpc. I was able to play a movie on the Mini through Plex and stream two to my iMac (one in Plex and one in QuickTime). All three played at once without loss of quality or a stutter.
No FireWire, but plenty sufficient.
 
Crazoski said:
I picked up the Seagate Free Agent 1.5TB at Costco. It's USB 2.0 only, but at $139 and $30 instant rebate I had to give it a try. I reformatted it to HFS+ and started loading it with DVD rips I did with Handbrake in Apple TV quality. It is plugged into my Mac Mini htpc. I was able to play a movie on the Mini through Plex and stream two to my iMac (one in Plex and one in QuickTime). All three played at once without loss of quality or a stutter.
No FireWire, but plenty sufficient.
Click to expand...

I am currently running my 750GB seagate USB 2.0 as a trail I have tried it on 3 macs and 2 apple tv's with no hiccups so far, I even started a backup of the drive and did some printing to see if it would run fine, so far so good.

I guess in the passed, when I tried USB, it was a few years back, I guess the drive probably was a 5400.

I know I will have to replace in the next year, I am now aiming at getting a 4 TB, for backup and a 2 TB I already have I will use for media content. Hopefully the 4 TB will come down in price.
 
I have 4 WD Mybook USB drives (1TB each). They work fine and have streamed off of them to multiple devices without issues.
 
I have 2 of the WD My Book Home drives. The Home series have add Firewire 400 and eSata over the Essential series. I have a 500 GB and a 1 TB. The 1 TB has been my time machine since I bought my iMac in March. The 500 GB I've had for a while and have recently started using it for movies and TV shows. The 1 TB is filling up, so I think I'm going to get a 2 TB for Time Machine and use the 1 TB as an infrequent, "off site" Time Machine.

I like the look of the My Books together and haven't had any problems with them. The only drive I've ever had fail was a 200 GB Maxtor back when that was the biggest size you could get. I only buy Seagates for internals, but I'm going to stick with WD for externals for the time being.
 
If you're not careful, you'll buy a ready-made external that you can't open.
 
Why Raid-1 if I have Time machine?

dgtlchild said:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax

Drives die. RAID-1 gives you more assurance of easier recovery over a single drive solution.

Mine has been running nearly non-stop for a little more than a year now. The external power supply died recently and NewerTechnology replaced it quickly with no questions asked.

j
Click to expand...

I dont really see the need for something like RAID-1, Time machine is just enough of a back-up solution for a regular consumer like me. Or am I missing something here?

Please enlighten me

Thanks
 
I have two Western Digital Elements usb drives that have worked great. One I leave hooked up to the Airport Extreme for Time Machine backups (constantly plugged in and ready to go) and the other one is going to find it's way hooked up to my AppleTV if it kills me. The internal drive is a 1TB Caviar Green drive. The nice part about both has been the price -- less than $90/HD when I found them.
 
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