impressed with WD portable hard drive

babkubwa · Post by **babkubwa** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 4:33 pm

Have been on the edge of another data disaster the last week with my 500gb lacie making some strange rattling noises.

Just picked up one of these little western digital drives - "my passport essential". They come in different colors, are bus powered, very quiet and seems pretty nippy too. Best thing is the price - 320gb for £60.

After a few more expensive models dying on me the last few years I'm really not ready to spend any more. For £60 I might well buy another one of these passport things though.

babkubwa · Post by **babkubwa** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 4:39 pm

http://www.digitalcamerareview.com/defa ... ewsID=3536

ethios4 · Post by **ethios4** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 4:40 pm

Does it have a power-saving "feature"? I had a WD MyBook that would turn off the drive after 15 minutes or so....there was no way to disable this feature and it was horrible for audio work. If I was performing and only playing files of my internal drive for awhile, then tried to play a file off the MyBook, it would take a few seconds to spin up the drive, during which time the music would cut out. Horrible!!

Just make sure your WD drive isn't doing the same before you buy another.

babkubwa · Post by **babkubwa** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:03 pm

mmm hope not! was definitely gonna wait a week or two before splashing out.

wouldn't be as much of a pain for me as I'm just sequencing and mixing rather than performing live.

ethios4 · Post by **ethios4** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:27 pm

The MyBook sucks for sequencing also! The drive keeps spinning down, and having to spin back up. A good friend of mine lost his whole drive because one of the fans wore out from all the spinning up and down, and the drive overheated and burned out. Hopefully your drive doesn't have the MyBook issues....it just made me really paranoid about buying the "all-in-one" solutions, like the MyBook. I just buy the drive and enclosure separately now, and put them together.

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:32 pm

I have had a lot of success with Seagate external drives.

elxicano · Post by **elxicano** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:44 pm

I have the same problem with the WD MyBook drives... the automatic shut off. I've already made sure its not the power save options for usb ports, and its the actual hardware.

Luckily I don't perform live.

@neb... I've heard good things about seagate as well, but could you suggest a model?

rokhausen · Post by **rokhausen** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:51 pm

ethios4 wrote:The MyBook sucks for sequencing also! The drive keeps spinning down, and having to spin back up. A good friend of mine lost his whole drive because one of the fans wore out from all the spinning up and down, and the drive overheated and burned out. Hopefully your drive doesn't have the MyBook issues....it just made me really paranoid about buying the "all-in-one" solutions, like the MyBook. I just buy the drive and enclosure separately now, and put them together.

Interesting... I've been using a MyBook firewire/usb for a couple years now, every day, and it's held it's own very well... although I think I remember reading about some failure issues with the earlier models.

Well the thing's finally about full and I'm looking at the WD Passport drives as a more portable next step. My only concern is the bus powering. One of my machines is a black Macbook and I've had problems powering things with it's USB ports before (an m-audio fast track pro debacle). I'd love to have a small 250+ gb drive that does not need an external power supply.

continuous · Post by **continuous** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:51 pm

I have to chime in here and say that the whole external drive thing is pretty frustrating. I've got my second drive going down (a lacie d2) and am seriously starting to wonder what external drive to trust. I know that none of them are 100% fail proof but it would be great to see some numbers regarding which have had the lowest failure rate.

Any suggestions?

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:53 pm

elxicano wrote: @neb... I've heard good things about seagate as well, but could you suggest a model?

I really can't - I have 2 seagates - one is IDE, and the other is a Sata. Both are reliable and have been for years. They also spin down, but never when they are being used, only when they are not accessed for a time. Both are USB2, and both have great file transfer rates.

I have this Freeagent in 750gb size, and I'd have no reservations of using it live: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148352

ethios4 · Post by **ethios4** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:53 pm

From my understanding, Seagate has the longest warranty at 5 years. I spoke with a couple of computer repair places and they all said they get less Seagate drives in than any other.

stonee · Post by **stonee** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:54 pm

i haven't been having problems with my mybook spinning up recently. i turned off my auto sleep hard disk for my mac, and i think it extended to the mybook.

im probably just nuts tho. but I haven't had anything clog up for more than a few seconds.

continuous · Post by **continuous** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 6:12 pm

ethios4 wrote:From my understanding, Seagate has the longest warranty at 5 years. I spoke with a couple of computer repair places and they all said they get less Seagate drives in than any other.

Awesome thanks! Sorry to bust up the thread.

babkubwa · Post by **babkubwa** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 8:13 pm

continuous wrote:I have to chime in here and say that the whole external drive thing is pretty frustrating. I've got my second drive going down (a lacie d2) and am seriously starting to wonder what external drive to trust. I know that none of them are 100% fail proof but it would be great to see some numbers regarding which have had the lowest failure rate.

Any suggestions?

+1

been burned a few times now. I'm feeling like the only answer is to trust nothing and never lay all the eggs in one basket. I'm spreading things around a bit , multiple copies. Also using dvds for the most crucial stuff.

I'm wandering when more affordable solid state drives gonna come on the market. I'm guessing the lack of moving parts should make them a whole lot more reliable?

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Mon Sep 29, 2008 8:16 pm

^ the issue with solid state (which is the same as flash drives) is the limited number of writes/rewrites. No moving parts is indeed good for battery life and reliability for stuff like laptops which get moved around...but for desktops, a regular hard drive is fine. For external drives, I think large solid state is still a long while away.

I think having redundancy of songs, files, samples, across drives, DVDs and multiple locations is always a good thing.