firewire drives

T

thejessicastar1

Active member
Not exactly sure what area this would go under, so I'll try here...
I've never bought a firewire drive before, so I was wondering what were the most reliable brands and where should I buy them from? Big retail chains like Best Buy, or somewhere on the internet? What should I avoid? I'm looking for around 160-200gb. If you all could give me some suggestions, I'd appreciate it.
 
Re: firewire drives

I just bought a Western Digital 120gig firewire drive a couple of weeks ago from Circuit City. I only got it store projects on for now. So as of right now its chillin in a drawer! I don't need to have it hooked up all the time. It even has red neon lights that light up because its in a clear case.
 
Re: firewire drives

Buy Lacie Drives and nothing else if you want to go external..They are the most reliable drives out there. Plus the prices are not horrible. Make sure when you buy a drive it has two firewire ports on it as well. That way you can daisy chain drives or other things. Seriously though go Lacie all the way.

http://www.lacie.com/
 
Re: firewire drives

Thanks a lot. I checked into the lacie's and they look good and sell for a good price. I appreciate the help.
Nathan
 
Re: firewire drives

You have many choices when it comes to external drives.  These choices can be mostly broken down to buying a drive and an enclosure separately, or buying a pre-assembled external drive.  One thing to note is that you're pretty much going to end up with same thing, except for the fact that you're generally going to pay a lot more for the pre-assembled product than if you bought the items separately.  Putting a drive in an enclosure is far from difficult.

BTW, Lacie enclosures are far from "the best".  I say "Lacie enclosures" because, like all other pre-assembled external drives, they use drives from the same HD manufacturers that you could buy yourself at your local CompUSA (mostly Maxtor and Western Digital, and some Seagate, Hitachi, etc.). I've witnessed just as many drives in Lacie enclosures fail as any other enclosure (pre-assembled or not).  The truth of the matter is that drives fail.  Sometimes the enclosure has something to do with this (poor heat dissipation, etc.), sometimes it's the working environment (too hot, lots of dust, etc.), but most often it's the drive.  It's kinda the luck of the draw.  I once bought 10 120GB drives from the same manufacturer.  Within 2 months, 2 of the drives had failed, but the rest are still working fine a year and a half later.  So in that case, I had a 20% fail-rate (BTW, don't buy IBM drives.:)  They make good drives and bad, but their reputation is mostly not good).

Here are some other threads along the same line:
1) External Firewire HD (link)
2) Hard Drives (link)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top