can you give me an external hard drive reccomendation please

morerecords · Post by **morerecords** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:55 pm

I need to buy an external eSATA hard drive, which will be used for both my writing computer (XP) and my mixdown computer (OSX10.4.11)

I have looked at the g-drive from g technology

http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/det ... no=7286935

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20 ... Q7500GB16/

and the lacie quadra

The main concern is getting 1TB with 32 meg cache and fastest transfer rate possible

and

a QUIET hard drive. I have had some in the past that are so frekin loud it s a joke. I like the 'fanless' G-drive design, but I have read review which point me to the OWC mercury elite. Problem is, that drive on ly has 16meg cache...

so who knows a thing about hard drives/specs? Why aren't there 1TB drives with 32 meg cache? I can't seem to find one

thanks in advance
MR

terragong · Post by **terragong** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 6:45 pm

well seagate has it

all in german but...
http://www.cyberport.de/item/8877/8734/ ... 5zoll.html

gjm · Post by **gjm** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 6:49 pm

I have a couple of 1 yr old OWC Mercury Elite Pro's. They are indeed quite.

So far they have worked flawlessly.

They shipped with Western Digital drives. I can't find the cache size. Probably 16 though.

debu · Post by **debu** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 8:51 pm

For streaming samples, I'm thinking of upgrading to this one in with an Icy dock as enclosure:

http://tinyurl.com/87md3b

j2j · Post by **j2j** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 9:00 pm

There is a brand new, very slick looking, 500 gb seagate free agent. I don't know much about it, but if it is 7200 rpm.... It is worth a look. I use two seagates, and I've had no problems.....

Knock on wood.....

morerecords · Post by **morerecords** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 9:17 pm

thanks fellas. after a bit of research, I think I am going with the new seagate ...

morerecords · Post by **morerecords** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 9:21 pm

I just read this:
"Per others, I'd forget depending on e-sata. The speed gained will not be worth the aggravation."

what aggravation? never used eSATA before,.... what could he be talking about? anyone?

nbinder · Post by **nbinder** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 9:39 pm

I was told that Seagate had the best quality.... Thursday my brand-new-2-days-old-Seagate disk crashed

I also have a WD 2,5" external disk which I use for my time machine backups. I don't know about the speed, but at least the enclosure looks really good and seems to be solid as a rock.

Edit: Just realized that this is completely offtopic

morerecords · Post by **morerecords** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 9:41 pm

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVEQ.cfm

I am going for this one I decided

nbinder · Post by **nbinder** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 10:03 pm

Looks nice... but no information about the harddisk inside, right?

tjwett · Post by **tjwett** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 10:18 pm

just avoid anything that has a Western Digital hard drive inside and you'll be fine. WD is shit, everyone i've ever had has died. so make sure you avoid Lacie as well b/c that's what they use. you can get an empty firewire or USB 2 SATA case for dirt cheap and just throw whatever drive you want in. i recommend Seagate or Maxtor.

nbinder · Post by **nbinder** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 10:20 pm

That's what I was told, too. Avoid WD, buy Seagate... see above what happened to me

Maybe I didn't see it, but I didn't find any information about the HD inside the thing morerecords mentioned.

Jaan · Post by **Jaan** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 11:03 pm

get the buffalo shinobi turbousb... best price.. best drive, very fast and very portable... and very cheap!!!

check them out... also for prices u might wanna look at beatmyprice.com and retailmenot..

cheers

adventurepants_ · Post by **adventurepants_** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 11:41 pm

tjwett wrote:just avoid anything that has a Western Digital hard drive inside and you'll be fine. WD is shit, everyone i've ever had has died. so make sure you avoid Lacie as well b/c that's what they use. you can get an empty firewire or USB 2 SATA case for dirt cheap and just throw whatever drive you want in. i recommend Seagate or Maxtor.

this just isnt true. If you deal with large numbers of computers, youll know that every brand of hard drive fails, regardless of cost and brand.

businessess spend a lot of money on good quality server drives, that run in RAID arrays, because they know that they will fail at some point. so its the backup and redundancy thats important not the brand of the hard disk.

tjwett · Post by **tjwett** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 5:05 am

adventurepants_ wrote:
tjwett wrote:just avoid anything that has a Western Digital hard drive inside and you'll be fine. WD is shit, everyone i've ever had has died. so make sure you avoid Lacie as well b/c that's what they use. you can get an empty firewire or USB 2 SATA case for dirt cheap and just throw whatever drive you want in. i recommend Seagate or Maxtor.
this just isnt true. If you deal with large numbers of computers, youll know that every brand of hard drive fails, regardless of cost and brand.

businessess spend a lot of money on good quality server drives, that run in RAID arrays, because they know that they will fail at some point. so its the backup and redundancy thats important not the brand of the hard disk.

well it's true that every WD drive i've had died. it's true that Lacie uses them. it's true that i've had much better luck with Seagate and Maxtor. it's true that i work with large numbers of computers for a living: 300+ Macs, 500+ Windows boxes, 300+ physically racked servers. it's true that we've had way more failures from WD and from Hitachi than any other drives. moving parts are moving parts but some move better than others.