External Hard drive suggestions.

Some "Green" Drives are 7200 rpm (the good ones are anyway), but can go into a low power mode at 5900rpm. So far my WD Green 1.5tb hasn't been any trouble, but read all the reviews online for a drive before you buy. For any real tasks always go with a good performance drive.

lol, http://www.icydock.com/product/Origami-hdd-storage.html , a cardboard drawer system for 4 hard disks that looks vaugely like a raid box. The only place selling them right now is like $7, but i'm sure someone can figure out how to make one in their spare time.
 
I have some Hitachi 2TB drives, 7200RPM. So far so good, no failures. I used to buy Seagates, but too many failed on me. I still have some WD and like 'em, but they don't always play nice with my macs. Not too many 2TB out as yet, that'll change in a hurry I'm sure. But what I'm really waiting for are 2TB SSDs at reasonable prices :)
 
we need to clarify here when we are talking about external drives in branded enclosures or just brands of naked drives themselves.

there are really only a few MAJOR manufacturers of naked drives. western digital, seagate, hitachi, etc...

some of those manufacturers ALSO sell drives in their own branded enclosures. and an enclosure will typically fail WAY BEFORE the drive itself does.

over the years i have had several external drives "fail" but in reality what failed was the enclosure.
i took the drive out of the enclosure and either put it into another enclosure, dock, or just hooked it up with cables and the drive itself was fine.

i personally have owned multiple external drive enclosures from just about all the brands you will hear mentioned here. lacie, maxtor, seagate, caldigit, promax, glyph, iomega, owc.
and i have had problems with nearly all of them. the question is, how big was the problem and what did the manufacture do to solve it?

lacie: termination issue. data (on TWO identical products) was corrupted and lacie cust serv took no responsibility or action
maxtor: firewire bridge gave out. put the drive in another enclosure and all was fine
seagate: touch sensitive power button wouldnt respond. seagate replaced product
caldigit: drive wouldnt mount. caldigit sent me new enclosure. all was fine
promax: enclosure power failed. promax sent new enclosure
glyph: never had problem (BUT i have only used one of their products, where i used several of the others)
iomega: noisy fan. iomega offered a new enclosure but i chose to extract drive mechanism and use in a dock
owc: drive had intermittent mounting issues. macsales overnighted me a new drive.

different enclosure designs may also be more prone to fail from heat dissipation problems. i used to ONLY buy drives (er, enclosures) with internal fans. but many modern designs now employ heat sinks where the whole structure of the enclosure conducts heat away from the drive mechanism. and that seems to be acceptable. but keep in mind, some designs are better then others and that may be were a lot of variable comes into play.

for a happy video life, what you need is the fastest RPM drive (7200 or better) with the fastest connection type and an effective cooling mechanism. thats really all there is to it. the rest is just details and some brands are better at those details than others ; )

as far as naked drive mechanism issues go. i personally have never had problems with any of them. but i have HEARD of problems with just about all brands at one time or another. i cant think of any brand that i havent heard of having a "bad production run" the question is how many and how often - AND what they do from a customer service standpoint to remedy it.
 
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And if your main goal for ANY hard drive, internal or otherwise, "green" or energy efficient drives are NOT what you are looking for. Green is a gimmick for home users who don't need nor want to pay the premium but want the save electricity.

IMHO, In real life situations, green drives don't save that much power, nothing extraordinary, and new hard drive are quite power friendly anyway, and the speed you will loose from the "green" drives is too great.

BUT, when a green drive is running (spinning) all the time, then it will change from 5400RPM to 7200RPM, making it faster but there will be quite a major delay before it goes, "hang on a minute! this guy wants speed"
 
FYI -
I work in the IT field and have for too many years to count. Based on my experience in all that time, and using every brand of HDD out there, I now ONLY use Western Digital. From Raptor drives - 10,000RPM beasts to newer "Green" drives, IMO they are the manufacture to go with.
YMMV - and every drive will fail over time, but I have returned many drives under warranty from all the different manufactures and Western Digital has been the easiest.

My last return was a WD raptor drive I was using for a boot drive. It just up and failed one day. It happens, but I make sure and have backups of every thing I own, so was up and running within 20 minutes with no loss of data. Anyway, the failed Raptor drive was a 150GB and WD sent me back a 300GB drive, since they apparently were out of stock of the 150GB drives. This has happened before with WD.

Want a return under warranty tip? Drive manufactures don't ask for sales receipts, just the date of purchase. If your date of purchase is within 30 days, you will get a brand new drive in return, past that date and they will send you a refurbished model.

Drive enclosures...they work of course, but I got tired of all the AC adapters for them on my desk. USB 3 is just around the corner and looks very promising.

Here is something to think about: So you go and invest in a raid solution, or otherwise something with tons of storage space. How are you going to back all that data up? No system is foolproof. Just some things to think about.

Terry
 
Here is something to think about: So you go and invest in a raid solution, or otherwise something with tons of storage space. How are you going to back all that data up? No system is foolproof. Just some things to think about.
Click to expand...

easy, with another raid =)
 
Raid 3 so when a drive fails, i replace the one that has failed asap and then it will rebuild itself
 
Smifis said:
Raid 3 so when a drive fails, i replace the one that has failed asap and then it will rebuild itself
Click to expand...

Yes, that is all good. Until you get corruption, then it goes to all drives. You could also make the same point about corruption with a single drive I suppose.

There are many options out there, you just have to evaluate what would work best for your own work flow and budget.

Terry
 
Hmm, I do backup my spreadsheet though, keep my head above water for the tax man but other than that, i'm stuffed if i do get corruption.
 
I went with Phanton 2 TB for $150 with USB/Firewire for my 15" MBP, but went with CS4.

It's working out great, it gets the job done and it looks great. Although, it is quite noisy. It's louder than my MBP.
 
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