Hard Drives

[DVX100Shooter]

I am thinking about getting an external firewire hard drive instead of an additional internal SATA drive. I was told not to get a Maxtor are they not good? I know Western Digital seems to be the choice by many. Any thoughts?

[Jive]

I've used Maxtor, WD, and IBM. I've had good drives and bad drives with all three companies. I once purchased 10 120GB IBM drives for external firewire cases. 3 of them died within the first few months of use. I currently have a 80GB maxtor (2.5 years old) going through it's death throws, but I have another 120GB (1 year old) that's still going strong. There are a lot of factors that lead a drive to die (heat is a major one, which may have been the problem with my IBMs), so it's hard to say that one company is worse than another.

The truth is, once a drive from a company dies on you, your hatred for said company is directly relational to the importance of the files stored on the drive.

Just make sure you get a good price and have some sort of backup scheme, because a drive will almost surely ALWAYS crash when you least want it to. ;)

[Yoyodyne]

Check out drives with 3 year warranty's. I know WD only has a few models with 3 year warrantys (I think the Caviar drives), they are more spendy but it's because they put more reliable parts in em' (from their scsi drives I think).

As far as bad drives go it's a crap shoot - they are so cheap now I say just buy a bunch and back stuff up.

Jive - you didn't have a few IBM 75GXP "deathstars" did you? From what I understand those drove IBM out of the hard drive business, it's now handled by Hitachi.

[Jive]

Hehe, no, I'm pretty sure I got the Deskstar 120GXPs. But I can certainly understand how their models got the "deathstar" name.

[sjz55]

I am using a Maxtor 120 drive in an ADS firewire case....on my mac with FCX and the result has been great. No Probs with Maxtor drives IMHO. *I have used Maxtors for years with great success...Maybe I am just lucky....Uh, scratch that last sentence.

Steve

[Guest]

Any opinions on the LACIE external HDs for MAC?

[DVX100Shooter]

I heard the Lacie drives are NICE!!!! I am thinking about getting a external firewire drive from them.

I bought a Maxtor 120 internal SATA drive last week and noiticed something puzzling. I had the store where I bought my Mac put it in for me and when I turned it on and pulled up that drive it said I had 114.65 gigs available. What happened to the other 6 gigs? There was absolutely nothing on the drive when I turned the computer on. Is that normal to not get the full amount of gigs?

[Jive]

Yes, the 120GB is the unformatted capacity. *Once the drive has been formatted, a certain amount is lost the to the formatting scheme as well as what must be allocated for the disk to function properly.

Also, I have heard nothing bad about Lacie drives. *A friend of mine has a 320GB model and loves it (though he's only had it for about 2 months). *However, they are expensive. Of course, the cheapest route would be to buy an external case and a drive separately as you can get pretty good prices on bare drives, while complete firewire drives are still sold at a premium.

[Lil_Red]

I have the lacie 120 and so far have had no problems with it, but I only store my fcp media on it.

[savage]

My buddy has a 120gb Lacie drive, he's had it for just over a year and it is still going strong, strong, STRONG. We have been constantly using it all year for storage of every kind of file known to man. No problems reported.