External Hard Drives

Jayson Crothers · December 22, 2007

I purchased a Lacie 250G external hard drive about 2 years ago to store all of my footage for my demo reel. It began having some problems about 6 months ago so I purchased another Lacie drive (320G) to back up my footage to; now that one won't even turn on and I'm in a scramble to save the data off of it.

My question is this - what brand of hard drive does everyone suggest I purchase next? I'm looking for something very reliable with a low failure rate. Any suggestions are appreciated. If it makes any difference, I'm operating with a an iBook G4, OS X 10.4.10.

Adrian Sierkowski · December 22, 2007

Hard drives sadly fail. I've had good experiences, though, with Lacie (the one designed by Porsche) as well as Western Digital (though not the Mybook!) and Seagate. The sad reality of it is that they have moving parts and as such will degrade over time, sometimes much faster than you'd wish. Perfect example: I have had the same Lacie drive for around 4 years now. . give or take, no problems, but I got handed a brand new maxtor from a friend which promptly died 3 days later.

Walter Graff · December 22, 2007

There is nothing wrong with Lacie drives. I own 16, some about five years old. Your "problems" do happen to any drive. Are you setting htem up as extended journaled drives? Have you done a disk utilities and repaired them on occasion. Are you traveling with them? This is a huge factor in lifespan. As is turning them on and off. You'd be better to let a drive run all day and night than to turn it on and off ten times. As for transportation, I tell folks my saying is to treat a drive like it is the only thing that supplies you oxygen and if you break it, you die. About the best plug in drives for Macs and video are G-raids. They maintain a constant write speed through 100% of the drive. Lacies start slowing down with Read/write when you get to 70-80% full. Since you are working off a laptop, perhaps you are not as stable in terms of staying in one place as a desktop. If it was a desktop a RAID system with redundancy will help protect files. But I don't know your situation, just throwing out thoughts. Lacie's come with atwo years warranty so if you are having a problem, you can have it replaced or fixed free. There is also software that will save a drive that doesn't show up on a Mac and looks like its broken. I use First Aid which has saved me a few times when a drive no longer registered on the desktop but still showed up in the disk utilities. This software allows you to access it and save everything on it. There is so much more but I can't narrow down what is going on with you without more detail.

Dan Goulder · December 22, 2007

If you don't have anything important stored on the drive, you can expect it to last forever. On the other hand...

First Aid sounds like a good suggestion. Thanks, Walter.

Byron Karl · December 23, 2007

I have experience with the G-Drive being solid, it's the winner at its price point. Obviously avoid LaCie and most cheapo store brands as you're getting a bunch of parts from China tossed in there of dubious value. Of the store brands Western Digital is better, but it's not the league of G-Drive. If you can't write off the expense Glyph Drive is better than G-Drive.

Walter Graff · December 23, 2007

Obviously avoid LaCie and most cheapo store brands as you're getting a bunch of parts from China tossed in there of dubious value. Of the store brands Western Digital is better, but it's not the league of G-Drive.

Please speak authentically. Lacie drives are not full of 'cheapo' parts made in China. Both Lacie Drives and G-raid drives are simply boxes with hard drives they buy and controller card to make them work. Lacie and G-raid use what is available in terms of drives. Lacie uses Western Digital mostly and others as does G-Raid that uses mostly Hitachi drives in their boxes as I have seen in most I have opened. In tests both drives perform equally well. Both give great warranties with Lacie recently upping their warranty to three years from two. The difference that might give G-raid a slight advantage is the controller chipset they use. G-raid uses an Oxford 924 chipset which is pretty good at doing all a drive needs to do to transfer info. Bad news for you is it is made in China. Sorry to tell you that. Please, if you are going to speak, speak from experience.

Phil Rhodes · December 23, 2007

Oh good grief they're all just cheapo made in china boxes.

The length of the warranty has nothing to do with the actual reliability of the drives - it's just how many they're expecting to have to replace.

Personally I avoid these things as they're far too likely to get moved while operating. They're usually very slow.

Phil

Walter Graff · December 23, 2007

Oh good grief they're all just cheapo made in china boxes.

That was my point.

The length of the warranty has nothing to do with the actual reliability of the drives

No it does not, just nice to know yo get three years. Used to be a year.

Personally I avoid these things as they're far too likely to get moved while operating. They're usually very slow.

Actually for portable work they are fantastic. And some of the models have fantastic throughputs. My business could not survive without the portability of these drives. I have seven in the field now with either radio or TV commrcials, or TV programs being edited all over the place.

Sakari Suuronen · December 24, 2007

Guys, check out Western Digital Mybook Pro 500gb. I've heard that they're pretty realiable and not that expensive. I'm shooting a doc at the moment and I'm storing my footage on those.

Paul Bruening · January 14, 2008

I know nothing about Macs. Can his G4 run SATAII through a card? The 3/4 ters are going pretty cheap on Tiger Direct. They were running about 22 cents per gig just before Christmas. Full ters were fetching about 30 cents per gig. They're getting cheap enough to just RAID mirror them for critical storage or for the drives that you grind on all the time.

January 17, 2008

i've 500GB lacie triple interface i've had for nearly 4 years, no problems over FW800. i had a 2TB lacie that looked like a cement block (4 drives), nothing but trouble. it had a bad FW chipset, they wouldn't admit to it, but it was. finally they replaced the cement brick with new 2TB(2 drive) slim and no worries at all, i throw heaps DVD isos, massive videos.

i always run defrag and checkdisk every day to keep them tuned and the MFT defragged, i have benchmarked with iometer and push the bandwidth limits of the FW specs ~82Mb/s

Damien Bhatti · April 15, 2008

I am going to get a G Tech drive the end of the month. Does it have a preference for being used with a MAC? or is it adept with a pc as well? Also in terms of size...I had a quote from a company that said around 13GB would be 1 hour of footage from digi beta. What kind of storage space do you need for, say, 2 hours of uncompressed digi-sp beta?

Edited April 15, 2008 by Damien Bhatti