External Hard Drives

[athene]

Ok Internets, I have a question for you.

For my capstone, I need to buy an external hard drive for my boss. The hard drive is going to be holding lots of high quality scanned images and possibly some video and audio files.

I'm thinking at least a 750GB if not at 1TB drive. USB connection or Firewire A connection a must (both would be better).

So, oh internets, what hard drive should I buy? Or at least what company should I go with/should avoid?

Thanks!

Comments

[lemonchiffon.livejournal.com]

We had a Maxtor that I dropped and it stopped working. So I'm not too happy with Maxtor, but I was an idiot for dropping a hard drive on the laminate floor. Lesson learned, external hard drives aren't portable. Strap it to a desk somewhere.

[congobeast.livejournal.com]

Have you considered buying a normal internal HDD of your preference and slapping it into an HDD enclosure?

[litch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've heard good things about the antec MX-1

[athene.livejournal.com]

Boss is somewhat of technophobe. She has a Mac. It'd be easier to get an external, instead of an internal-in-an-external.

[kjpepper.livejournal.com]

Don't you have a seriously nerdy husband for these sorts of questions?

I'm just saying.

[athene.livejournal.com]

yes I do. but I thought I'd get other opinions also.

[drackyyn.livejournal.com]

Keep these things in mind:

1) Maxtor sucks.

2) Seagate bought Maxtor... I certainly wouldn't trust Seagate any longer.

3) Internal drives with an external enclosure. Best of both worlds right? Well the power supplies on external enclosures tend to break. I would only suggest this is your boss understands that replacing the enclosure is likely in the near future. It's certainly possible to get a good enclosure, but I'm at a loss to tell you what to look for...Internets?

4) Dont forget eSATA as an option...much faster than FireWire if your systems supports eSATA.

[athene.livejournal.com]

Boss is somewhat of technophobe. She has a Mac. It'd be easier to get an external, instead of an internal-in-an-external.

[missingwatch.livejournal.com]

eSATA won't be supported on the mac, but if you're doing video files i recommend the firewire drive. and dont' buy off the mac store--overpriced.

[azlinwulfkin.livejournal.com]

So far I've had good luck with OWC's Mercury drives. The ones that are currently available are in a new enclosure. They are essentially an internal drive in an enclosure but they come well rated for what that's worth. They also come with multiple modes of connectivity USB, Firewire 400/800, or eSATA depending on how much you want to spend.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/

[deravyn.livejournal.com]

Since your boss uses a Mac, I would go with either of the following depending on budget.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/TR716ZM/A?fnode=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/storage&mco=NjUxODM3&p=3&s=topSellers

or

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10969
which comes in 3 different sizes.

I like the Lacie best because you can configure it for your boss depending on how important the data is vs. the amount of storage needed.

Good luck
L

[stagemonkey.livejournal.com]

I swear by Seagate and Samsung for internal drives, after going through a looong series of Maxtor and Western Digital drives. I don't have too much experience with external drives though. As drackyyn mentioned, Seagate bought out Maxtor, but I haven't seen any decline in the Seagate products as a result (hopefully, Maxtor has gotten better, but I still won't touch them).

If you happen to have an old piece-of-crap PC hanging around, you might try building a FreeNAS box out of it (which is what I use for my storage these days) but you lose portability that way.

[artemis42]

I've heard that the La Cie drives they sell at Apple stores are unreliable, my Mac folks tell me to go another route, even though I have 2 of them myself.. apparently the drives just die suddenly.

[parathalyn.livejournal.com]

I love the My Book I have, so I'd recommend it.