Please Recommend an external hard drive

R

Rasquachemedia

Well-known member
I was hoping to get some advice on external hard drives. I have a mac and prefer something with firewire 800.

I'm looking at 200-500 gb. But this is the problem. I've read on this forum that Lacie's are not reliable. This was my first choice :cry:

I also read the same thing about g-raid, second choice :cry: :cry:

Now in magazine articles I usually read great to good reviews of these, but it looks like real life experience is very different.

I'd like to hear what other's are using and if you would recommend the brand and model you have w/o reservations, or at least too many reservations.

I'd like to make my purchase by this evening, so any suggestions and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

thnx in advance.

update: i'm interested in firewire 400 too.
 
Build your own:

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product.../1066?osCsid=3f3b3b604baaf69758521a8abbc352d1
plus two of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144179

For a total of $390 bucks you've got 500GB!

A buddy of mine built this and works great. He had a ***** of a time getting the oxford chip to recognize the two drives as a RAID because he was using a PC. As soon as he hooked it up to a buddies Mac he was able to set it up in a RAID conf. that worked great on his PC afterwards. Since you are on a Mac already you will not have that problem.
 
the ultimate quick and dirty is to run the store and buy a lacie. they're everywhere. I've done that a few terabytes worth. I have one 500GB lacie d2 drive which less than a year from purchase is about to DIE. the rest of the clan, I think about 8 total of varying sizes--are doing well.

Other than the lacie, I have no other experience with any other external drives other than the solution I write about below:


the long term, better solution might be this link below for you. an external hot swappable SATA drive. you need a host card. setting it up..is not that easy if you aren't used to working with computer parts. that said, I think the performance on the SATA drives you can buy is exceptional. a 300 GB maxtor is now $139..compare that to the $420? you spend on the lacie 500GB..which can be iffy?? and slower.

here is the link. granite digital makes a similiar product also. start reading and decide, but if you are in a hurry..look elsewhere. I have a 2 bay burly and WISH I bought the 4 bay..

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php
 
Consider building your own. Pretty straightforward using Hitachi drives. More reliable than Lacie so it depends on reliablity vs ease of getting it set up.
 
If you want the best, buy Glyph. There is no substitute. At least, until you get to large expensive redundant RAID systems... I've heard good things about Granite, but have no personal experience... but I've had lots of non-Glyphs, and lots of Glyphs, and everything else has problems eventually. Even my 5-year-old oldest Glyph has never had so much as a stutter. I speak of Glyph recording drives (such as, currently, GT050, GT-Key), not their network storage drives. They're also fast, and the quietest drives around.
 
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