External hard drives, which ones to buy?

M

mattistupid

Active member
I need a new external but I'm having trouble making up my mind, I'm new to the whole RAID idea so any information or suggestions would be very helpful. Looking for anywhere between 500-1TB.
Cheers.
 
just stay away from ANYTHING La Cie!!! or really ANYTHING you can find at a local compUSA or Frys or other retail computer/av/office supply store.

caldigit, glyph, gtech, owc, promax.. all good and all more or less direct mail order only
 
It really makes me nervous when people say don't go LaCie, especially when I have 2.6TB of LaCie storage! (non-raid)

I haven't had an issue so far, been running the two drives about 6 months now. Planning on buying two LaCie Rugged drives soon too.
 
Sam Davies said:
It really makes me nervous when people say don't go LaCie, especially when I have 2.6TB of LaCie storage! (non-raid)

I haven't had an issue so far, been running the two drives about 6 months now. Planning on buying two LaCie Rugged drives soon too.
Click to expand...

I understand where you're coming from because I still use 5 Lacie D2 drives and I thought that with the D2 series Lacies problems were over. Sadly that's not the case and I have had a D2 Drive (Somewhat) Fail me. In the past before the D2 series I owned 2 Lacies that failed right in the middle of an important project, luckily I was able to save the date. That was back when the drives were huge with onboard power supplies and fans. The station I worked for got me hooked on Lacie back in 2002 on a discreet logic edit system, a lot has changed since then.

At this point I have purchased my last Lacie drive and I plan on going Cal Digit swappable next. I guess I'll use my 5 Lacies as back-up HDD's at that point
 
the problem that ive had with La Cie (TWICE) is that i used them to transfer client data from one machine to another in a separate office. each time a LOT of the data got corrupted.

smallest problem: content only shows up in the open and save dialogs within software (not at the finder/windows explorer level)

biggest problem: files dont open at all or if they do they are full of various visual artifacts.

twice bitten, thrice shy.
 
So far I've had excellent results with my WD My Book 1 terrabyte drive. Picked it up at Costco...$299.00


DO NOT get a LaCie. It cost us $4500 to a data retrieval service to get our info back. We had the raw files backed up, but had been a bit lax on working files. Lesson well learned. NO LaCie, ALWAYS backup religiously.
 
Let me also add Dulce Systems to the list of quality raids in a wide range of pricing. Excellent support. I've been testing their Pro DQ raid-- direct PCI interface and an 8 drive raid set up in raid 5 handles 2K footage without missing a beat.

Ned
 
wgzn said:
just stay away from ANYTHING La Cie!!!
Click to expand...

And what about the "rugged" LaCie drives? (with the rubber cases) - I wanted to buy them for backup when I'm travelling... They are supposed to be physically strong when not in use (e.g. if you let them fall or if they treat them badly at airports etc.).

So is there another "rugged" drive that you'd chose for backup on journeys or do you think the LaCie Rugged would do it until home?
 
i dont know this for fact, but id consider the lacie "rugged" drives just a marketing ploy to fish in the foolish.

i read the documentation and from what i saw, there are no internal shock absorbtion features. it all just comes down to that silly rubber bumper. which may be handy if your drives are getting thrown around in your hotel room. but as far as general travel - thats not going to make ANY difference at all. unless maybe you carry your drives unpadded in a sack or something?!?!?! and even then, the rubber is only on the edges - NOT the top or bottom

any well-packed external drive will travel just as safely as this so-called "rugged" product.

when i travel, i pack mine either in with a couple of sweaters in my clothing bag or packed securely in a hard pelican case. and in several years of travel ive had not a single problem
 
All I can say about this is that for some reason whenever I read someone complain about a drive dying it is almost always a LaCie. Perhaps its been 100% actually. That's good enough for me.
 
Well,

It's funny because I'm sitting here with 3 LaCie little big disk 320s and 1 160gb model. And through all the daily abuse and tumble have yet to have one single problem. They have been outstanding! :)

But I do think the "rugged" lacie drive is just a bunch of crap. Purely for show as already stated.

Those little 2.5" drives are pretty tough, but bottom line, if you're really rough and tumble at some point your going to run into troule with just about any drive regardless of the enclosure if you're that hard on them.

As for larger externals from Lacie, I've had great success with them too. YMMV
 
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no doubt that's a truthful report . . . yet you should learn to "knock on wood" when making those statements. There is far too much evidence to the contrary. I wish you continued sucsess.

I guess it just boils down to, do you want to trust important stuff to the cheapest drives available?
 
just to play devils advo here - another thing to consider is that lacie probably sells 5x as many drives as its nearest competitor. so with that many more units out there, the math plays out that there may be that many more complaints.

but my reality is = owned two identical lacies. both failed me. done.
 
I'm with Sam as my level of nervousness has just skyrocketted...I guess I've been lucky with the D2 LaCie's. I've gone through 5 - 500gig drives (non-RAID) without a hiccup. *crosses fingers*

This weekend we had to have a PA run out and buy a last second drive. He bought a Western Digital My Book - what a piece of poop. It failed and we lost 2 16 gig cards of data. Thank God we had everything else backed up.

This forum is invaluable.
 
wgzn,
I've heard exactly that argument before and perhaps its true, and I've heard pople say they've had great luck with them , but i don't want to take any chances.

- Lenny
 
If you mean storing video prod files to an external HDD (whatever the brand), just don't forget that mirroring (RAID1) is the insurance for your data.
No single brand, no single HDD maker is a "no data loss" guarantee!

If you are looking for a ruggedized external drive, configurable as RAID1 (or RAID0), with your choice of FW800, eSATAII & USB2, you could consider:

SR3610.gif


SR3610 from stardom.com.tw

I use one of this unit with eSATAII to a VAIO running DVRackHD/OnLocation in RAID1 mode.
 
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