Which external hard drive to buy??

J

jimmy1

Member
I'm Looking for a external hard drive to store my footage to. I have heard that RAID +1 is a must and that G RAID is the way to go. My question is, are there alternatives to the G RAID that are as good?, lower priced?, better?, easier to use? I know about the p2 store and the firestore drives are those good for storage? I heard the firestore crashes? I was shopping them today and got a little mixed up...
Any imput?
 
here is what i use, in order of frequency:

1. caldigit, any product
2. OWC, mercury elite (macsales.com)
3. iomega, ultramax quad interface - these are the ONLY drives that i trust that are available at stores like frys, office depot and best buy, etc...
4. glyph, any product
5. maxtor, BUT BE WARE - the newer generation seem better than the old stuff. but in 3 this year i have had one fail
 
jimmy1 said:
I'm Looking for a external hard drive to store my footage to. I have heard that RAID +1 is a must and that G RAID is the way to go. My question is, are there alternatives to the G RAID that are as good?, lower priced?, better?, easier to use? I know about the p2 store and the firestore drives are those good for storage? I heard the firestore crashes? I was shopping them today and got a little mixed up...
Any imput?
Click to expand...

Do you want to EDIT off them or just STORE footage on them? I love my G-Raids for editing. I store my footage on bare sata drives when I'm done with a project. I keep 2 identical drives of everything just in case. I mean you can get a 1TB drive for $99 bucks these days. I include the cost into my project.
 
I've been using this:
Lacie, 1TB 2big Triple Interface 2-disk RAID.

It's 2 drives in one box so at Raid 1 it's 500g working to both.
It has a big blue on-light that will impress clients :)
 
I'm mostly storing with the occasional self titled edit project. I'm mostly in the field so I need something bombproof. Thanks for the info. I think I'm going with the graid or the mercury driver.
 
I've used probably 20 of every drive out there. ON a Mac I would definitely stay away from Lacie. They work great for 1 year until exactly after the warranty expires. This has happened to me 3 times. No more Lacie for me. I also can't stand Western Digital drives. They always seem to have some proprietary format issues, are slow, won't seem to show up, etc.

OWC is a good company. Their external drives are good and they have decent customer support. Seagates also have longer warranties than most of the others.
 
I use 1TB Seagate "Free Agent" drives. They're great, as fast as my old Lacie, but not as rugged. I would not use one with a laptop that you will be transporting around because if you should "bump" it, that may be the end of it. That's what happened to me once. But it was replaced almost instantly by Frys, where I bought it.
On the flip side, if it's to back up a desktop, they are great, easy to find, easily set up, very reliable, very reasonably priced, and most importantly, have a 5 year warranty.
 
Anything you can buy at Staples, Office Depot and Costco I would stay away from for critical files, and that includes the Free Agent drives, Maxtors, WD drives, etc.

Not a fan of Lacies. I read too much at other discussions on failures.

I would suggest a solid Hitachi or 720.11 Seagate in a case from OWC or Granitedigital.

Takes about three minutes to install the drive with four screws and you have something far more reliable.
 
@StabSteer. Second BOTH of those observations. Also, Lacie is very computer agnostic: fails equally well on a PC. Seagate drives have treated me far better than either of those two brands.
 
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