New External HD needed - recommendations please

[wlaidlaw]

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What with being used as a back up drive for both my Intel iMac and G4 iBook plus DNG storage, now with all the huge 16 bit Tiffs in my iMac, I am fast running out of space on my current USB2 Connectland 250 GB external hard drive. I don't terribly like it anyway - it is too noisy, get very hot and isn't very fast. I would like to get a Firewire 800 quiet, cool running external HD, which has two 500GB SATA drives, which I can run mirrored (I am not a RAID fan). It must be capable of being left on 24/24. I don't want an Ethernet one which connects to my router as both my macs run wireless and that would be too slow, even at my current theoretical but rarely achieved, 108mbs pre-N network speed. It would be an advantage if the drives could be upgraded at a later date to 1TB units. I would welcome recommendations particularly from other Mac users.

 

I know I could save lots of space by going to Aperture but even with Eoin's upgraded M8 matrix hacked in, I prefer the output from C1 with one of Edmund's profiles - sorry Eoin.

 

Wilson

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[marknorton]

Not sure why you don't like RAID - mirroring to another hard drive is essentially the same thing though the storage efficiency is lower. With any redundancy, you are trying to cover for a single component failure and hope that failure rates are such that you will not get a second before you've recovered from a first.

 

I use multiple ReadyNAS NVs locally attached to my server with multiple wireless attached clients; for heavy duty use, it makes sense to have the core of the network - server, NAS, router wired; if you run everything wireless, performance is bound to be an issue. ReadyNAS can be used 24/7 with a power down mode to keep the average temperature down.

 

Equally important for me is a small hard drive for backing up images when I am travelling - I load to a lap top and immediately backup to a Freecom 40Gb external drive about 6cm * 6cm * 1 cm - smaller than an iPod.

[frv]

I use a LaCie Two Big 1T in RAID 1 mode.. Thats a hardware RAID one. I have eSata PCI cards for my Macpro and Macbook pro's. I suppose you can not get anything faster and reliable and the costs are not high. I pulled out a disk while backing up and it was no problem. Pushed it back in later and I did not even notice it. Very safe it is. I bought 3 Two Bigs so there is no way I could loose data really. In my Macpro are also two disks in RAID 1. I have never lost data in the past 20 years, not even once.

Firewire and USB are to slow, my Macpro does not have any data on it just apps. I also have the disks on different places in case of theft. I tried connecting the Two Bigs in RAID1 on my airport exstreme (USB) but it did not work so I bought the eSata PIC cards and that worked very well (3Gbits/s).

 

Everything I do is in RAID1 these days. Even my system on my Macpro. I have several clients on a deadline seen fighting to get their data back and running to the store for a new harddisk. For a few hundred euro's all that is nearly never needed anymore.

It is weird though that since I use computers (1988) I have never had a crashed harddisk. Use Mac's since then as well on a daily basis. I change computers every 3 years maybe that helps as well.

[wlaidlaw]

Dear All,

 

Thanks for info. I don't like RAID as I think it works the discs too hard. Back when hard discs were much less reliable and I had IBM System 36 and IBM 6000's in my business, I was always replacing the hard discs in the server box. The hard discs on the 36 became very difficult to find and I eventually resorted to buying second hand ones and having them rebuilt. I changed over eventually from IBM's version of RAID to running mirror 4 times a day. My hard disc failures dropped dramatically. My main use will be back-ups from the iMac, so I am sure a direct connection via an 800 Firewire is the right choice. What I am really looking for is how quiet and cool are the alternatives such as the LaCie Two Big iT and the Buffalo Terabyte.

 

Wilson

[Kent10D]

Photo file management is such a sticky issue, and an approach that works for one photographer might seem like total chaos to another. So with that in mind, let me describe my current approach.

 

I use primarily Lightroom, and currrently maintain two photo libraries (or "catalogs" as they are now called).

My Main Library, which contains everything I have ever shot/scanned resides on a 1.6 TB RAID array hardwired to my network. Admittedly even gigabit ethernet is not as fast as SATA or firewire, but the system is solid and reliable (so far).

I then have a second Work Library on a smaller, single firewire or USB hard drive. Any DNG files that I am actually working on or are planning to work on get copied to the Work Library. Any TIFF files generated by passing those files to Photoshop stay in the Work Library as well.

The reasoning is thus: assuming that you are the type that rarely throws anything away, and you have 20,000 files in your library, how many of those files are actually going to be used for printing or display? My guess is maybe 400 ~ 500. Keeping just those files on a fast disk means that you have a smaller library which will run faster anyway, and you won't have to sift through thousands of files to find what you're looking for. All your original files remain intact, as shot, on the network drive (and of course they get copied to DVDs occasionally for further backup).

As long as you always download everything you shoot to the network drive first, and then select the shots you want to work on and copy them to your work drive, you'll always have a backup, albeit one that doesn't include any editing you do, which might not be a bad thing. And although your Main Library can and will expand as you shoot, you can maintain a relatively compact, fast-running Work Library that doesn't require a huge disk.

 

At least that's the theory.

 

Sorry for the long-winded post. I know the approach I have described won't be ideal for everybody, but it might set some other ideas in motion.

 

Cheers,

 

Kent.

[Samir Jahjah]

Check out Data Robotics, Inc..

 

It is pricey but gives you peace of mind as your library increases in size!

[wlaidlaw]

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Photo file management is such a sticky issue, and an approach that works for one photographer might seem like total chaos to another. So with that in mind, let me describe my current approach.

 

(and of course they get copied to DVDs occasionally for further backup).

 

Sorry for the long-winded post. I know the approach I have described won't be ideal for everybody, but it might set some other ideas in motion.

 

Cheers,

 

Kent.

 

Kent,

 

I am doing something similar to what you are doing. However part of the problem is that I have still not settled on what I am going to use long-term in the way of photo software. I currently use C1LE as my RAW converter, iPhoto as my library and PSE4 as my photo-manipulation tool but it is bore having to swtich back and forward between 3 programs, albeit the results are good. If I stay with this combo, I will almost certainly upgrade to CS3 and may also upgrade to C1 Pro, when V4 comes along, although I agree with most, you get precious little extra for a lot of money ,when you upgrade from LE to Pro. I am also trialing Aperture at the moment. I have done Eoin's hack on the pList to update the M8 matrix from 1.06 and if I could get this a bit better, I think I would happy to go this route. I have been told not to bother to back up to writeable DVD's as their life can be abysmal (maybe as low as 18 months). Tape is yesterday's technology and I last used it about 6-7 years ago, using a DAT back-up - sloooowwwwww! I am sure a big hard drive array is the way to go. I will take my existing external HD back to the UK and use it as an additional back up for the PowerMac I have there, which has already got 2 x 250GB SATA drives in it. I will probably give in at the end and use RAID, as I think hard drive failures are so much rarer these days, the software has improved and the drives are now happier to be run almost continuously. It is more seamless approach than cross-mirroring.

 

Wilson

[Guest Metroman]

I use the Buffalo 1Tb Terastation Pro - just got a second - you can set them up as four individual drives, mirror, raid 1 or raid 5. Drives can be swopped out and replaced easily. They have two USB sockets for chaining. Ran mine over 100 ethernet network here at home and they were faster than the wireless. Recently upgraded to a gigabit network and now it's like having the afterburner on!!

 

I run Macs and a PC. The Terastations running as RAID 5 no problems and the units are quiet - another consideration!

 

Buffalo Technology

[Joe Mondello]

Other World Computing makes some very nice drives which I have found to be most reliable long term.

 

FireWire Drives & Accessories at OtherWorldComputing.com

 

Available RAID or not.

[Kent10D]

I have been told not to bother to back up to writeable DVD's as their life can be abysmal (maybe as low as 18 months).

 

Wilson,

 

OK, now you're scaring me. 18 months!?

I knew there was some uncertainty regarding the longevity of CD-R and DVD-R disks, but I hadn't heard such a pessimistic estimate. Although I have heard that buying cheapo disks is asking for trouble. I have CD-R disks that I burnt as long as 7 years ago that still read OK. DVD-Rs are much newer, of course, so there's no real way of knowing. But this is a serious issue for any type of data backup and storage. Keeping everything only on hard disk seems like a bad idea, but if your DVDs are going to self destruct in under 2 years ...

 

I guess the best approach to backup is to adopt a policy of re-writing the disks every couple of years just to be sure. What a pain, but that data is valuable, even if it's just personal photos.

 

Maybe the film guys have a point ...

 

Kent.

[Kent10D]

I use the Buffalo 1Tb Terastation Pro

 

That's what I have (the 1.6 TB version), and I like it for pretty much the same reasons. As you say the RAID 5 mode seems to work reliably, and I like the idea that you can easily swap out individual disks. I've been meaning to buy a spare disk just in case, but you know how it goes. Quiet is good, too.

 

Cheers,

 

Kent.

[wlaidlaw]

Kent,

 

I think the Buffalo may be the one for me. I see lots of bad reports on both the LaCie and Iomega 1TB external boxes but no complaints on the Buffalo. It is a bit more expensive but TANSTAAFL. The whole set up in France is in my study/bedroom, so quiet is important.

 

DVD's I recorded TV on three years ago now have occasional drop outs on them (mostly Panasonic and TDK DVD+R). The only ones 100% so far are the DVD-RAM rewrite-able ones, which surprises me - I thought it would be the other way around.

 

Wilson

[photolandscape]

I can tell you what I wouldn't do better than what I would.

 

I bought the same Western Digital 1TB drive--3X--and all were defective.

 

Then I went for a Maxtor 1TB One-Touch. Despite a lot of non-sense from their almost non-existent tech support assuring me that the second of the 2 500GB drives was mirroring the 1st, it wasn't. It too was dead.

 

So as much as I would dearly like to find something that I can feel safe in using, so far I haven't.

 

Best of luck.

[papih]

for mobile HDD, i can recommend lacie's 2.5" rugged drive. I use fw800 to connect to my mbp. That's maybe the fastest external drive (maybe even faster than some desktop internal hdd one).

i have the 120gb version. Cost more than a comparable external notebook drive, but i think the ruggedness and speed is excellent.

 

LaCie - Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive - FireWire 800, FireWire 400 & Hi-Speed USB 2.0

[wparsonsgisnet]

Wilson, I, too, am avoiding RAID.

 

I use 3 different drives for my images and keep one off-site. And I use LaCie drives, 300's and 500 or 600's. I make mirror copies for each project/subject/shoot.

 

Because these things fail, I buy the refurb drives from LaCie. Since LaCie will only provide a 1-yr warranty, I figure they should pay for the replacement case and boards from Ultra, now at $60 (sourced from Micro Center).

 

In all, I have had 4 LaCie drives fail. All but one woke right up when I put the drive in the Ultra case. In other words, the boards and not the disk are failing most of the time.

 

I have 8 drives at the moment and am now buying the 500 or 600gb. I haven't made a diecision, yet, about staying with the 3-protocol drives (2 usb and firewire) or going with a single protocol drive. I have a 3 that are usb-only.

 

This picture-taking stuff sure is fun.

[wlaidlaw]

Thanks all for your advice. I am going to just manage for this year and when I go back to the UK in October, I can get a better price for 1.5 TB Buffalo Drive Station Duo there and prices will most likely have fallen again. In view of all the problems people are having with 750 GB and 1TB drives, I did wonder if I would be better sticking with 4 x 250GB for the moment. These 250's seem pretty bulletproof. However Buffalo's Drive Station Quattro does not come with a firewire interface like the Duo does, so that is that decision taken out of my hands. Someone told me you can get a little dongle that plugs into your iMac Ethernet port, so that you can then go peer to peer and plug Ethernet drives in directly to your iMac - anyone heard of this?

 

The real reason for my delay of course, is that I have just spent the money on a Voigtländer 35mm f1.2 Nokton, after reading Sean's review. A few minutes after buying it, I phoned Leica to see if there was any progress on my Noctilux (not expecting good news) to be told it is finished and in final checking, so I may have two fast lenses by the end of the week - got to get my cloak and fedora out.

 

Wilson

[dugby]

Winston, you're showing you're age talking about System 36's and RS6000's. Back in those days the mtf of those old esd/esdi and scsi1 disks was from a different era.

 

You are very correct with your comments on DVD-RW AND CD-Rs... they are inherently short term storage because of the dye based technolgies.

 

Tape today with Gen3 and now Gen4 LTO is the media of choice for corporate/govt storage compliance for data availability, and with data migration technologies makes it future proof. Remember writing your AIX data to QIC ,8mm, 4mm dat? How could you read any of those tapes today?....Data migration modernises this for you.

 

For domestic use I just put twin Samsung 500GB Sata2 drives as Raid1 into a D-Link NAS, DNS-323 for my photos. It was put in place to provide 'Continuos Data Protection' (aka CDP) for my children's school work. I will regularly dump the NAS data onto LTO, and use data migration to keep moving it along as the media progresses.

 

I went for the Samsung's as they were rated as the quietest Sata2 drives, and they're made in Korea

[wlaidlaw]

Winston, you're showing you're age talking about System 36's and RS6000's. Back in those days the mtf of those old esd/esdi and scsi1 disks was from a different era.

 

You are very correct with your comments on DVD-RW AND CD-Rs... they are inherently short term storage because of the dye based technolgies.

 

Tape today with Gen3 and now Gen4 LTO is the media of choice for corporate/govt storage compliance for data availability, and with data migration technologies makes it future proof. Remember writing your AIX data to QIC ,8mm, 4mm dat? How could you read any of those tapes today?....Data migration modernises this for you.

 

For domestic use I just put twin Samsung 500GB Sata2 drives as Raid1 into a D-Link NAS, DNS-323 for my photos. It was put in place to provide 'Continuos Data Protection' (aka CDP) for my children's school work. I will regularly dump the NAS data onto LTO, and use data migration to keep moving it along as the media progresses.

 

I went for the Samsung's as they were rated as the quietest Sata2 drives, and they're made in Korea

 

Dugby,

 

I am afraid I started long before System 36's and RS600's - my earliest programming efforts were in Fortran II on an IBM709-8 (valves) and an English Electric 2000 (mixed valves and transistors) doing x-ray crystallography analysis at university.

 

I presume you are using one of the Ultrium rather than Accelis LTO's - whose do you use? After my company got taken over in the mid 1990's, I "acquired" all three unwanted Sony DAT units - just as well - they kept failing and eventually I went over to doing cross back-ups between the various PC's in the household. My second 250GB SATA in my Powermac in the UK, is only used for back ups, so I would have to have a double disk failure to loose everything.

 

Wilson

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[dugby]

I feel younger than you....I started on PDP11/70, DEC10 and then IBM Series1 and S370. Anyway enough of that ...

 

Yes am using Ultrium2, Ultrium3 and soon Ultrium4.

 

The D-Link NAS DNS-323 is great for the domestic environment, have a quick look at the specs: 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure - DNS-323 by D-Link

[ericperlberg]

My current thinking is to use smaller drives rather than larger ones. A 250 gig drive fills up for me in 3 mos or less. If yours fill up faster use a 500 gig drive. Smaller drives have better MTBF ratings (mean time between failures) than the newer 750s and 1tb drives. I'm currently running a 10,000 rpm OS and applications drive, a 10,000 rpm scratch drive for photoshop, a backup to the applications and OS drive and two data drives, one a backup of the other. I schedule backups daily using Super Duper. On the data drives I use server grade highest rating MTBF 7200 rpm drives I can find (article on MTBF ratings being overly high: Hard Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce?). The ultimate point being that if the worst happens, you lose less data by switching drives more often. A loss of 250 gigs vs a loss of 750 gigs. I'd chose the former.

 

My reasoning for staying away from large drives is that the longer a drive is in use, the more likely it is to fail, statistically speaking. Fortunately I have a MacPro with 4 internal drive slots so I can use simple internal drives. These are way cheaper than enclosed stuff like Maxtor and LaCie "drives" (the use of quotes is because you don't know whose drive mech is inside until you own it). The problem with buying external drives is each time you buy one you buy a fan, a power supply, a case, cables, etc none of which you really need. If I had an iMac (I assume you have a 24" because you say you have Firewire 800) I would buy a good quality Firewire 800 enclosure and just slap new internal disks in the enclosure when the old one's fill up. And with simple internal drives take up less space in your closet or off site. You get to pick the manufacturer and quality of the drive and the cost is way lower than a full LaCie or competitive drive. In this case you get better for less. I have nothing against RAID but a raid controller just adds to the cost and complexity and is something else that can go wrong. The article referenced above mentions a study of large server farms in which disk failure rates ranged from 2-3% up to 13%.

 

Like Schroedinger's cat, you never know whether you're going to be experiencing a lifetime of trouble free HDs like someone above mentioned or if you're going to have a high turnover of HDs with constant headaches or something in between. So I try to keep it simple and wait for a better solution.

 

For my laptop on the move I do use the LaCie small firewire 800 drive mentioned above. It's nice. I back it up onto internal drives, wipe it clean and start again. Too expensive to stick in the closet when full.