External Hard Drive Recommendations

[jelderfield]

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I know that this topic has been covered before to some extent - but I'm still not suite sure what to buy.

 

I just bought the M8 last Saturday - and before I start accumulating too many files I want to make sure I have a good back up external hard drive in place and running.

 

I'd like to get something quite big - 500gb or 1TB and maybe have it be mirrored. But I also don't want to spend too much. There is a Fantom 1TB drive available at onsale.com for about $280. I could get 2 of these!

 

My current plan will be to have 1 set of files on the Mac, 1 (or 2) set(s) on external HD's, and (maybe) a set on DVD.

 

Does anyone have recommendations for external HD's?

 

Cheers,

Jonathan Elderfield Photography

[ylshih]

EHD's generally use similar interface chip sets and one or more HD's from a HD manufacturer. There are some performance differences between chip sets, but I would worry less about that than the HD. HD's generally come from Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung or perhaps a few others. Most all the major HD manufacturers have similar quality standards and occasional quality crises. Typical HD failure rates are 1% per year for most any manufacturer even when their production processes are in spec. If you go online, you'll find recommendations for all and horror stories about all.

 

So the first step is just ensure that the HD inside the EHD is from a major manufacturer like a WD or Seagate. However, I would actually just find a deal on a WD or Seagate EHD, not just look for their drives inside a EHD. Here's why - no name EHD's have been known to buy WD or Seagate rejects or reworks that aren't acceptable to the PC manufacturers that are disposed of in bulk at low prices on the secondary market; trust me, you don't want these HD's and you can't tell these apart unless you know their manufacturing codes. However, they generally offer the same quality HD's as for PC's within their own products.

 

Next, don't count on the HD 100%, because over a 5 year period, you'll still have a cumulative 5% chance of failure, so plan accordingly (with DVD-R backups, a 2nd EHD or RAID) for your critical files. Also, HD design operating life is typically 5 years; so plan on some upgrade cycle after 3-5 years if you keep it on 100% of the time (EHD's that put the HD to sleep/spin-down when not operating will help to extend the calendar life).

[jelderfield]

Thanks for the advice. I'm also thinking about online storage but have not looked in to that yet.

[losta]

OWC (Macsales.com) has good quality hard drives at a decent price. Also Wiebetech more expensive but good drives. One thing to keep in mind is the type of connections, alot of the inexpensive drives are just USB 2, I try to get firewire 400/800 and USB2 and some of my drives are also SATA.

[Guest sirvine]

Online storage is a non-starter, in my experience. Too expensive and you still have all the same hardware issues, and less control over how the hardware is configured and managed. If off-site storage is your issue, it would probably be cheaper to burn DVDs.

 

Personally, I keep a copy of my photo libraries on the internal HD, a backup copy on an external RAID, and burn DVDs of selected photos which I then store at my office (off-site). It's hard to imagine ever losing anything important in that configuration.

[Joe Mondello]

I'll second the recommendation for OWC (http://www.otherworldcomputing.com) for external HDs.

 

Last year I picked up a 1TB FW 800 RAID for $549 which I believe is now selling for $419. I also have their eSATA (I have a PowerMac G5 tower) which was $499 and is very very fast. In fact the eSATA is my photo drive and the FW800 RAID is now its backup!

[roccoriley]

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I know that this topic has been covered before to some extent - but I'm still not suite sure what to buy.

 

Does anyone have recommendations for external HD's?

 

Jonathan Elderfield Photography

 

Check out the RAID NAS systems from Buffalo and Infrant. Both are good, Infrant is better (=more money).

 

Choices depend on the imprtance of your data.

[xrogers]

I also recommend OWC for hard drives and enclosures. I just purchased a case for $119 that takes two drives, supports raid/span/separate disks, has a quiet fan, FW400/800 and USB 2 interfaces, and supports SATA drives. I got two 500GB drives with 5 year warranty for about $140 each. It took about ten minutes to put it all together.

 

The enclosure is very well made, and keeps the drives cool---that is critical with these hot, high capacity drives.

 

Use raid to provide continuous operation or speed, if that's critical to you. Don't expect a raid mirror to serve as a backup for itself. If you do a stupid thing like delete a directory of photos, the raid mirror will delete it from both drives, and you'll lose your data. I'm using the external enclosure to back up two big disks in my G5 tower. I'm not concerned with continuous availability speed, so don't bother with raid.

 

Until later,

 

Clyde Rogers

[charlesphoto99]

I just picked up a Fantom 1tb drive after doing lots of research. Great prices and service at newegg.com. I was thinking of an Infrant but didn't really need the networked capabilty, and at that price could pick up multiple 1tb drives for redundancy.

[Guest sirvine]

If you have a lot of computers, the Infrant is nice. You can plug it into a gigabit switch and then attach devices (like laptops) as needed. Whenever I remember, I plug my laptops into the switch, log into the Infrant, and run an incremental full backup of the laptop drive.

 

I also freed up tons of disk space on all my computers by consolidating my music library on the Infrant. It has a nice streaming media function that "just works" so that every Mac on the network shares a single iTunes catalog. I know it's a bit more than needed, but starts to explain the price difference.

 

I have had terrible experiences with enclosures, include from OWC. I find the build quality is generally pretty bad, and tech support is spotty at best because there are too many variables involved when you're not buying a turnkey solution.

[wparsonsgisnet]

I use LaCie drives -- which I buy refurbished from the closeout section of their website.

 

Their drives are fast, pretty, and work very well for me. I buy them refurb'd because the guarantee on external drives isn't very long. When they die it's the circuit boards not the hard disk, and I can buy replacement cases with boards for $40. I figure the drive mfr can pay for that. Hence, refurb.

 

The last one I bought is a 600gb. There is a 500 there now at $129 and a 600 at $149.

 

I do not use software mirroring instead copying myself to a second drive and a third off-site. There was a post on this subject some weeks ago and I believe there was a statement that you need level 5.

 

I power down my drives when I'm not using them, so the backup has to be manual, anyway, and I save the cost of the raid hw and sw.

[xrogers]

I have had terrible experiences with enclosures, include from OWC. I find the build quality is generally pretty bad, and tech support is spotty at best because there are too many variables involved when you're not buying a turnkey solution.

 

The OWC enclosure I got was from their Elite-AL series---a bit more money, but a very good enclosure. I agree that most enclosures are junk, and you don't want one of them. And I won't use a passively cooled (fanless) enclosure for drives like the 500Gb, they simply run too hot and can cook themselves if improperly cooled.

 

I like buying bare drives because the warranty is better (five years on the drives I buy), and replacement service is fast and easy (at least from seagate, who owns both seagate and maxtor). I'm comfortable putting them together, and have never needed tech support. And unlike Bill, I've had several drives fail over the years, but never an enclosure (even the cheap junk ones). Go figure.

 

Until later,

 

--clyde

[LJL]

I will chime in again on storage....for those that read past "tomes", feel free to bypass my comments.

 

Completely concur with folks suggesting OWC for drive cases and good deals on drives. Just built two more of the Elite-AL cases (FW 800/400 and USB2) with two 500GB Maxtor Maxline Pro drives in each. Each drive in one case gets backed up to a drive in the other case, rather that use any RAID. This ensures two copies that you make or schedule to be made as needed. So if you accidentally erase a file or directory on one, you still have it on the other for slavage until you update the copy. The OWC cases are very good, quiet and well made.

 

For the RAID side of things, the Infrant Technologies NAS system stuff is hard to beat, unless you want to spend a whole lot more for mission critical stuff. Setting up on a gigabit switch is the way to go, as already mentioned. Another RAID option is HighPoint and their RocketRAID controller cards and X4 cases. They are blazingly fast, but the fan noise is a bit more than the OWC or Infrant devices. They are also dedicated SATA connections, hence the greater speed. I use it as my processing drive in a RAID 5 configuration, then once a project is completed, I move it off the RAID 5 and onto one or more of the OWC set-ups. Gives me speed and on the fly back-up while working, then separated back-ups once moved to other externals, where they are more archive, but still readily accessible.

 

For HDs themselves, go for Maxtor (now Seagate) and Hitachi, and WD. There are some differences within some of the lines, such as the Maxtor 500GB Quickview versus the Maxtor 500GB Maxline Pro. The Quickview were designed more for TiVo type applications, while the Maxline Pro are more "enterprise capable". Difference of a few bucks, but it may or may not matter to you.

 

No RAID is safe without another back-up of some sort. Even the RAID 5 stuff could experience two catastrophic drive failures before you replaced a bad one, and then you are toast. However, most drive failures are going to happen sooner than later. Best advice is to burn a drive in for several days running before starting to use it for critical storage. Bill's concept of buying refurbs works here, as those drives are usually stable by that point.

 

If you want to get into HD performance, go check out the various tests posted on Real World Speed Tests for Performance Minded Mac Users They put things through the paces and report quite candidly on things.

 

I have no affiliation with any of these folks....I just have and use a lot of HDs for lots of storage....experience is a good, but often brutal teacher.

 

LJ

[photolandscape]

I was in the same situation recently--looking for a 1TB HD (2x500GB). I started out being dazzled by the low price on a Western Digital 1TB drive that seemed to fit the bill, for $369 at Costco. The first one was dead. The second one was dead. (Called WD support both times and confirmed with them). Returned the second one to a different Costco, thinking I might have better luck and get one out of a different lot. It, too, was dead on arrival.

 

So I looked on line, Costco has the Maxtor 1TB on sale for $399. Ordered it and it arrived today. And perhaps best of all, it actually works and works very well. The La Cies are good too.

 

As someone who recently came very close to losing over 400GB of photo data, I certainly learned the importance of backing up data onto 2 drives, and burning DVD's regularly and storing them off site--just in case.

[Joe Mondello]

So I looked on line, Costco has the Maxtor 1TB on sale for $399. Ordered it and it arrived today. And perhaps best of all, it actually works and works very well.

 

Be sure to back it up!

 

I had the 600GB FW 800 RAID Maxtor One Touch Turbo III and it died after 8 months. They replaced it with a refurb and that one died in TWO DAYS!

 

I also have G-RAID 500 GB FW800 and it's FAST! but it also died and had to be replaced under warranty. The new one clicks sometimes which makes me wonder. . .

[sean_reid]

One simple portable drive that I've been very happy with so far is made by Seagate and uses mesh sides and an alumimum enclosure so as to disperse heat. It's just a USB drive.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[marknorton]

It's impossible to overstate the importance of backing up not just your photo data but everything on your PC(s) and it's also important to recognise that the drive you are backing up to may fail as well.

 

I use Infrant ReadyNAS which are RAID 5 (so any one of those drives can fail without data loss), do a full backup of my server and several clients once a month, an incremental every night. I also maintain 2 complete generations of data in addition to the current backup which allows me to re-create my data to any day in the last 2 months.

 

More than once, I've found I've deleted data without immediately realising it, found it gone in the current backup but there in a previous backup.

[gloec]

I got the Western Digital MyBook 500GB and so far I am very pleasead with it.

I would like to have a Raid NAS system but they are still very expensive here in Greece. Hopefully, in the near future I will be able to buy one.

[jelderfield]

As per Bill's rec. above I got a LaCie 600GB USB last night on the refurb section of their site. If it works out I'll get a second one. Plan is to have Mac, 2 external drives and then burn best selects to DVD for safe or off site. Now I just have to remember to do the backing up.

Jonathan Elderfield Photography

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[ericperlberg]

Now I just have to remember to do the backing up.

Jonathan Elderfield Photography

 

I use SuperDuper and schedule backups for all my drives to happen in the wee hours of the morning. Works a charm. SuperDuper is easy to use, straight forward, logical and widely recommended though it costs money. A free (I'm fairly sure) alternative is Carbon Copy Cloner which has most of the same features.