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What is the best External Hard Drive For New Imac?

L

lifeline

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 29, 2009
14
0
I want the most secure and most protected so I do not have any chance for me to loose my information. I hear good things about g tech, what are your experiences? Should I go with a RAID, will it work with IMAC? Any help would be great. I did tons of research and found nothing but conflicting info about each brand. My eyes are bleeding now.
 
Have a Seagate FW Firewire. Quiet,fast,reliable(so far)and stylish.Highly recommended.
 
Can you recommend any brands & models that I will have worry free used, setup and running.
 
Here's the scoop - all HDDs fail. Some have a better reputation (WD) than others (Maxtor), but it's all a crapshoot. There are bad batches - for example, early on, Seagate 1.5TB drives were failing at a very high rate, which Hitachi 1TB were very reliable... then there was apparently a bad batch of Hitachis. If you are buying it as an external drive, and not the enclosure and drive separately, then again, reputation depends not just on the HDD inside, but the quality of enclosure. I like WD drives, but unquestionably they can be troublesome with Macs through firewire connection - possibly bad drivers. LaCie has had a lot of problems with power supplies on some of their enclosures. G-drives have been failing recently at an alarming rate. And so on.

So, first you need to determine what you want to use the drive for. If it is just for TM, then I'd personally get just a cheap drive (twice as big as the drive you are backing up) with an ordinary USB (though stay away from iomega external drives, they're trash). Same if you're just going to be using it for streaming media - I'd get one of these Western Digital My Book Studio II - 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0/FireWire 400/FireWire 800/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH2Q20000N - I have two of them, in RAID1 configuration for my music streaming. If you hope to use the drive for something more intense, like editing or the like, make sure you have FW800 - and get drives that are 7200RPM with 32MB cache - and make sure it's not one of those "green" drives (like the WD Green), cause those spin down and up very slowly, and it'll drive you nuts. But RAID1 is a good solution if you just want redundancy - though it is not a backup as such, because if you erase data mistakenly, it'll be gone from both drives - all RAID1 does is protect you from one hard drive failing (but doesn't protect you if a controller fails, or in case of fire or theft etc.). I'd stay away from Drobos - they use proprietary system - not raid (something they call BeyondRAID), and if it fails both, you get no data off of it cause it's proprietary... and they do fail. Also, they are dog slow, FW800 or not - just dog slow (on the bright side, they are dead simple to operate).
 
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Simplest?

2 separate drives.

1st one is a clone of your internal drive, 2nd one is a clone of that.

USB or FW doesnt matter.

Software, such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper can be set to backup your drives at any time interval you like, and backup "incrementally" so only the new/changed data gets copied.

I run this exact setup, 2 backups per day, one at noon and the other at 7 pm. And then that drive backs up to another identical drive 10 minutes later.

Worst case scenario I would lose 1/2 days worth of work.
 
OldCorpse said:
Here's the scoop - all HDDs fail. Some have a better reputation (WD) than others (Maxtor), but it's all a crapshoot. There are bad batches - for example, early on, Seagate 1.5TB drives were failing at a very high rate, which Hitachi 1TB were very reliable... then there was apparently a bad batch of Hitachis. If you are buying it as an external drive, and not the enclosure and drive separately, then again, reputation depends not just on the HDD inside, but the quality of enclosure. I like WD drives, but unquestionably they can be troublesome with Macs through firewire connection - possibly bad drivers. LaCie has had a lot of problems with power supplies on some of their enclosures. G-drives have been failing recently at an alarming rate. And so on.
Click to expand...

QFT...my thoughts:

thegoldenmackid said:
As much as I was happy buying a G-Tech, I bought my G-Raid was the assumption that one of my other drives would fail like I read about online, every drive I have owned has worked flawlessly, so for me the G-Tech was not really completely worth it.

But everyone has their own experiences, but I imagine that most of them are positive. Sure, there are these threads about how person x's drive failed and person y wouldn't buy anything but them. I own three drives that there are plenty of horror stories about.

For the most part no one is going to post "I Love My _____ Drive" unless two things occur. Either: A. They just purchased the drive – hard drives fail, if it worked out of the box, that's a good thing; but, to give a positive rating takes at a bare minimum six months, if not a year in my book. B. Someone said that _____ Drive is bad. Remember these companies ship millions of drives. Western Digital, Seagate and Hitatchi all make tons of drives internal and external; a couple of users are going to have some problems, but for the most part – most customers drives probably work.

The best advice is to find one that has a good warranty and excellent customer service. And then avoid reading these threads so you don't lose any sleep.
Click to expand...

Try this.
 
lifeline said:
I want the most secure and most protected so I do not have any chance for me to loose my information. I hear good things about g tech, what are your experiences? Should I go with a RAID, will it work with IMAC?
Click to expand...

It's foolish to buy a canned (i.e., prepackaged) hard drive because if it fails inside the warranty period you cannot disassemble it to determine if it's the drive or the enclosure's controller that has failed. You have to send the entire thing in - data and all - to the company and they will not recover your data for you.

You should look into Other World Computing's Mercury dual-drive FW800 enclosure and put two Samsung, Seagate or Hitachi drives in it for your RAID. Personally, I avoid Western Digital drives as they've been nothing but trouble for me (the drives and their customer "service", an oxymoron in my book).
 
well I went with a 4tb Guardian MAXimus RAID 1 for OWC and input of suggestions for set up. The OWC tech guy really thought this was the best for my needs. Good Choice?
 
Just another thought. For my photography business I have 1 copy on the internal drive and another on an external. However, I also keep a copy by project/client on DVDs. DVDs are a much safer bet than hard drives. I've had hard drives that have out lasted the PC (over 8 years) and hard drives that have failed in months. DVDs should last 50 to 100 years depending on use and storage. For archival/backup purposes DVDs are the safest way to go.
 
Trek2100 said:
Just another thought. For my photography business I have 1 copy on the internal drive and another on an external. However, I also keep a copy by project/client on DVDs. DVDs are a much safer bet than hard drives. I've had hard drives that have out lasted the PC (over 8 years) and hard drives that have failed in months. DVDs should last 50 to 100 years depending on use and storage. For archival/backup purposes DVDs are the safest way to go.
Click to expand...

DVD's may last 100 years but will there be any DVD readers then? It seems to me an electronic backup that can be migrated trhough time from media to media is the only option with storage devices changing every several years.

Having said that this thread was about data backup of the computer and I see archiving as a different issue. Archiving for decades electronically on one medium isn't possible unless you stored the gear to read them on.
 
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