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Recommendation for good external hard drive?

V

vlasciar

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 20, 2011
13
0
There are soooooooo... many different external hard drive out there right now and I personally quite confused on which ones has the best durability and performance. Any suggestions? I have always stick with Western Digital, but not sure how reliable LaCie or OWC HDD.

I'd mostly used the external hard drive to store movies which I will then play through my LCD using Plex.
 
Neither LaCie nor OWC make hard drives. They make enclosures and stick whatever cheap drive they can get into it.

The only important thing about a hard drive besides price and capacity is the warranty. Get a drive with a 5-year warranty, no less.
 
miles01110 said:
Neither LaCie nor OWC make hard drives. They make enclosures and stick whatever cheap drive they can get into it.

The only important thing about a hard drive besides price and capacity is the warranty. Get a drive with a 5-year warranty, no less.
Click to expand...

I have never heard that. That really sucks. I just bought a LaCie after my POS Maxtor failed. I have a LaCie that I bought years ago when 160 GB was a lot of storage. It is still going strong, so I was comfortable buying a new one. Now I feel I need a back-up for my back-up. Great.
 
Get an external enclosure and load whatever HDD you prefer. This way you have complete control over the actual HDD used and if it fails, can replace it yourself.
 
miles01110 said:
The only important thing about a hard drive besides price and capacity is the warranty. Get a drive with a 5-year warranty, no less.
Click to expand...

That's not quite true. Rotation speed and cache size play a role, as well. There's quite a noticeable difference in performance between 4200, 5400, and 7200 RPM drives.
 
tbayrgs said:
Get an external enclosure and load whatever HDD you prefer. This way you have complete control over the actual HDD used and if it fails, can replace it yourself.
Click to expand...

+1 for this.

I bought a dual bay enclosure from OWC and installed two 2TB WD drives in it, i use this to house my iTunes media.

I then bought a HD Dock from OWC and two more 2Tb drives and i use that to back up with (backup about once a month).
 
From A Buick 8 said:
+1 for this.

I bought a dual bay enclosure from OWC and installed two 2TB WD drives in it, i use this to house my iTunes media.

I then bought a HD Dock from OWC and two more 2Tb drives and i use that to back up with (backup about once a month).
Click to expand...

Which particular enclosure did you get? I guess it make more sense to buy your own enclosure and get the HDD brand that you trust the most. I'd definitely need something with a Firewire 800 connection for faster connection.

In terms of LaCie, my office uses them for video editing and it seems to be quite reliable so far.
 
vlasciar said:
Which particular enclosure did you get? I guess it make more sense to buy your own enclosure and get the HDD brand that you trust the most. I'd definitely need something with a Firewire 800 connection for faster connection.

In terms of LaCie, my office uses them for video editing and it seems to be quite reliable so far.
Click to expand...

OWC makes great products and has everything from single to 4 bay enclosures.

I personally have been using an Icy Dock Dual Bay enclosure hooked up to my Mac Mini via FW800 set up RAID 0 for the past two years without incident--plug and play, nice and quiet with variable speed fan, small footprint. I'll likely switch to a 4 bay enclosure sometime in the future (maybe something like this), probably when I replace my current Macbook with a new Mini. :D
 
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