What Hard Drives to Use?

[Alex Worster]

I'm just finished the first week of a feature I'm the B cam 2nd/digital loader on and I'm encountering some hard drive problems. Production bought 4 3TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro drives and after the first week only 2 remain standing which has me very concerned. One seems to have a bad FW800 port out of the box and one seems to have developed a bad FW800 port after 5 days of use.

 

Long story short I'd like to know what types of hard drives you all recommend I have production buy? Which ones do I stay away from? The ones production initially bought had no eSATA port so I've been FW800 daisy chaining the whole deal. That said, I would love to have the next round of drives we get have an eSATA port as I have a Firmtek expresscard34 dual eSATA card that would probably make the transfer time a little faster.

 

Thanks!

[Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC]

Glyph drives are great but expensive. G-Raid's are great as well. Both have FW800 and eSata. I personally own two OWC drives and went to buy another not to long ago and the store I got them from stopped selling them because of their crappiness. I back up everything now. I've also worked with custom built eSata drives as well. However we had some problems mounting the drives every once and a while... but they all worked.

 

I'm just finished the first week of a feature I'm the B cam 2nd/digital loader on and I'm encountering some hard drive problems. Production bought 4 3TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro drives and after the first week only 2 remain standing which has me very concerned. One seems to have a bad FW800 port out of the box and one seems to have developed a bad FW800 port after 5 days of use.

 

Long story short I'd like to know what types of hard drives you all recommend I have production buy? Which ones do I stay away from? The ones production initially bought had no eSATA port so I've been FW800 daisy chaining the whole deal. That said, I would love to have the next round of drives we get have an eSATA port as I have a Firmtek expresscard34 dual eSATA card that would probably make the transfer time a little faster.

 

Thanks!

[Von Thomas]

Go G-Tech, they use server quality drives, and have a good warranty. Of all drives I've used over the years, and I've been through hundreds, G-Tech is the safest for the money.

[Satsuki Murashige]

I also like G-Tech. I've heard of people having issues with Lacie drives, but the D2 Quadras and Ruggeds have always worked great for me. Rockstor and Caldigit get used quite a bit on set and are fairly reliable too. I think in your case though, since G-Tech is well known and widely considered to be the most reliable brand out there, that's what you should recommend to production. CYA and all...

 

Stay away from Western Digital "My Books". They're not very reliable, and I've had several that I could not get to eject after copying. Never used OWC, sorry to hear that they suck!

 

Whichever brand you go with, eSATA is the way to go for sure - keep your source and destination drives on separate buses. I don't think it'll be way faster, but it should be faster than it is now. (I really like the R3D Data Manager app, but boy is it slow compared to Finder copy...)