External Hardrives

P.S. The drives are the LAST place you want to skimp, especially if you only have one or two! Unless you're extremely diligent about backing everything up (which is in itself costly), the cost of losing a drive is extrremely high - and often the lost work is unrecoverable. Skimping on your drive is like storing your tapes, without cases, scattered around inside your car. Inevitable disaster waiting to happen...
 
I've used 'em all - Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and ALL of 'em have failed on me at one time or another.

My tongue-in-cheek theory is all the drive manufacturers get together once a year and decide who's going to have a run of crappy drives that year, because they'ave ALL had dogs. The only manufacturer that I've never had one of their drives fail is Samsung, and they are hard to find.

Quick dying drive tips I've learned over time:

If your drive is starting to get the "click of death", as SOON as you hear it, immediately start transferring your data. If the "click of death" is constant, immediately power down the drive, take it out of the computer if it's internal, wrap it in 3 or 4 layers of plastic bags, and put in in your freezer for a day. It sounds totally crazy, but I've revived 3 or 4 drives that way... something about the cold skrinking the metal and allowing it to read better is what I was told.

If the drive spins up but you get a "drive needs to be formatted" message, your data is probably totally recoverable. Get "get data back" from runtime.org. It's saved my ass many times.

If the drive powers up but won't spin up (you can hear the head move, but not the platter rotating) sometimes powering down and holding the drive and very sharply twisting your wrist a half dozen times while holding it will "unstick" whatever is stuck and allow it to spin up -- once it spins up, get all your data off then and there, because it might not spin up again.

Above all, back up your stuff to another hard drive, to DVDs, or, better yet, buy a Terastation. The smaller ones can be had for 5 or 600 now, and they offer full RAID-5. Even if a drive fails, you just replace it and it rebulids and you don't lose anything... you can even access the Terastation while it is rebuilding.
 
calchip said:
If the "click of death" is constant, immediately power down the drive, take it out of the computer if it's internal, wrap it in 3 or 4 layers of plastic bags, and put in in your freezer for a day. It sounds totally crazy
Click to expand...

I recovered a friends data in exactly this manner. He was quoted around $5000 Australian dollars for recovery. We managed to get everything off after about 20 times of doing this. All I used was a ziploc bag and stuffed as mamy little bags of silica gel I could find in there. We air coned the room as cold as we could get it (was summer).

I used almost exclusively seagate in my pc days and never had a crap out.
 
I've never had a drive 'fail' on me. Most of the problems that I've had were with drives not wanting to mount. I have a Maxtor that has a bad FW connection - but fortunately it has two. I've got a Seagate that randomly falls asleep and takes 10 seconds to spin up once it wakes up. Then I've got two 320GB WDs...I used to LOVE them, but now I'm having serious problems getting them to mount. So, I'm gonna put them on the shelf as backup/archive drives and I'm currently shopping right now. Looks like G-Drives might be my best option. RAID is overkill, but I do like the warranty that G-Tech offers...little piece of mind.

Another option would be to get a swap-out external SATA FW enclosure. That'd allow you to put whatever HDDs in the enclosure that you want, and just swap them out - sounds like an attractive option to me, especially for archive and client work. Just buy a new HDD for each new client project, and hang it up on the shelf when you're done.
 
Kholi said:
It's only 2.0, that's why.
Click to expand...

What's the 2.0 mean? And the difference between the fire wire and USB is just speed correct, no quality will be lost if I'm transfering video files using USB. I'll be transfering the files from my internal hardrive to the external.
 
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I have to echo calchips comments- all drives die. I've had Maxtors (Great format and transfer software), Seagate, WD... they all die eventually. I also found out the hard way, that all Raid configs are NOT equal. I had a 0+1 setup, and one drive died, losing everything. I set up a raid 5, and one disk went funky, but the data was still safe on the other two drives.

Now, what I want to see, is a small firewire drive that will record data, footage, audio, without needing a PC. Sort of like an all purpose Firestore, without costing as much as a nice used car.
 
I use the enclosures for clients all the time. And what I've started doing is telling them to buy two HDDs (or have me buy them and bill them), one for main, one for back-up. Then they can take them away when I'm done or whatever. But the storage starts to add up, so I've started making clients pay for their own drives.
 
Question:

I am about to purchase a few drives for editing in FCP. AND, I don't have Firewire 800 ports. Should I get Firewire 400 or UDB 2.0?
 
Aram, you got a great deal. FW is so much more than USB. I guess I willl just have to keep an eye out for sales. I think I will go with firewire just because everyone seems to think its a faster.
 
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