External HDD required

I have a Western Digital My Book (albeit a 250GB) and have been using it for about a year and a half without complaint (for a while as my primary hard disk - long story). One thing I particularly like is that in contrast to the Formac model I owned previously it is virtually silent and doesn't sound like a jet engine.

regards, Tam

My LaCie 250 Gb unit performs well. I've only had it a couple of years so reliability is not yet proven but I have no reason to anticipate problems.
Ken

I have had to bin two WD external HDDs in five years, so from my experience these are best avoided. I'm now using a Segate but at less than a year old it is unproven.

Cheers

I also have a Lacie 250GB external drive, which I use to back up photos'.
I've had it for 4 years (IMSMC).
In this time it's worked very hard, & moved home twice.
No problems so far ...

I have a few, and find them all annoyingly noisy, except for one that is one of my old Toshiba laptop drives in a USB caddy. At the summer sounds thing Paul told us the drives in the HDX are Seagates, and that Naim's testing had found them to be the quietest and also extremely reliable. Now knowing this I would tend to trust Naim's judgement when I next need to replace a drive or expand my storage capacity.

I have a Seagate Freeagent 500 Gig it's quiet.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Interesting about the Naim comments. The reviews are so mixed on Amazon for all the different makes it's difficult to draw much conclusion. There's actually a Seagate Freeagent 500Gb model for just £55 so may well go for that.

Howard, have you had yours for long?

Iomega used to sell external discs with a cooling fan. They were probably far more reliable than non-fanned HD's but I don't wnow whether they are still in production.

Either way, I'd use an external disc only for backing up an internal disc - be it just for its speed.

About 7 months.

I've used quite a few LaCie drives over the years without a problem so far. Got one at home that's 6 years old and it still works fine (it's not a quiet one though)

I recently installed an interesting solution for backing up my wife's digital photographs, a Drobo. This is a RAID-like device into which you install up to 4 hard drives of any capacity you choose. It is barely larger than 4 HDs stacked on top of each other and contains software that distributes what you have stored across all four HDs. What this means is that any one or even two of the HDs can die and your data remains safe. Go to the web site for a couple of videos illustrating how it works. Unlike a RAID device, this requires no in depth knowledge of IT matters and is simple enough for any novice (like me) to install. It hooks in via USB and the computer (PC or Mac) sees it as an external hard drive like any mentioned above. I learned about it from one of the Mac magazines I picked up a year ago traveling through the LA airport. We both sleep better now knowing that we do not need to worry about a HD crash, and we all know that all HDs crash sooner or later.

It sounds as if you want the ecternal HDD to offload your internal drive - just remember that way you have only one copy of the music, which will be lost if the drive fails.

In the US, you can get drives with 5 year warranties, and I'd get a couple of those (since I'd want a backup).

I've seen failures in Seagates, WDs, Maxtors, Quantums, etc., so I just get the longest warranty I can.

Phil

Try to find SSD drive, if expensive, buy anyting from WD, Seagate or such and take care to turn on/off pc with external HDD off.

I have a lacie 500gig NAS drive feeding my sonus system...and a 2nd drive in the mac pro - a samsung spinpoint...both seem fine...

For what it's worth, I was in a Mac shop today buying a new keyboard and I happened to enquire about hard drives. I have a LaCie 120GB extl drive which, judging by its capacity, I've had for more than a few years!! Without any problems I should add!

The chap in the shop seemed very impressed by the G-Drive models saying that they use the best components etc etc. Then again the 7200rpm 500gb model was just shy of £200 which seems alot. Very pretty mind!!

Peter

I don't think LaCie makes drives; rather they package components into external drive packages. That means the drives are sourced from...WD, Seagate, ??

I haven't seen any fail, but I've seen only 3 in the field.

Last time I looked they offered 1 year warranties.

Phil

Don't buy the lacie drive from the mac shop! Take a look around on the net - i got mine from ebuyer...

Well, what a lot of food for thought! Thanks for all the replies.

It seems that maybe at the level I'm looking at it's pot luck whether you get a reliable drive or not!

Phil, I take your point about having two drives with one for backup. At the moment I only have an 80Gb hard drive in my PC. I back up important files and iTunes and other downloaded purchases(very few)to DVD-RW discs. Most of my iTunes library is ripped CDs that I own. My only use for iTunes at the moment is for loading up my iPod. I know it would be very tedious to rip them all again but I am philosophical about this!

The Drobo certainly looks like an good product; though at over £300 (UK Amazon price) just for the unit and then having to buy the drives on top of this is a bit more than I was looking to spend. Loved the demo video with Cali Lewis though!

Bear in mind that if your HD fails and you have all the music on your iPod then you can just pull it back over. That is, you should be able to do this, but apple make it very difficult, it encodes the file names when putting them on the ipod. There is a utility on the mac called Senuti which does this superbly (and I have used it several times without problem). I imagine there is a similar one on the PC.

regards, Tam