Yet another external drive question.

I've had my MacBook Pro since June and I'm ready to buy an external drive and start backing stuff up. Been reading a lot of reviews on different brands and the reviews are just all over the map. After reading a MacWorld review of a G-Technology drive I started checking into those. Funny thing I've noticed is how different the review scores are between say a 1TB drive and a 2TB drive. A 2TB G-Drive is pricey but the reviews are great. On the other hand I've read so many bad reviews of other drives I would gladly spend the money not to have those problems.

So anyway I was hoping to gain some insight from those who have knowledge and experience in this area. Thank you in advance for your input.

It's really difficult to say. We use a lot of external drives for our home business. It's difficult for me to trust reviews, to be honest. Today we had a bit of a disappointing experience with a new LaCie Stark 2TB drive. It came in this morning, FedEx dropped it off. We plugged it in and started transferring some files, it was literally (and shockingly...) dead, completely, 2 hours after delivery, 10 minutes after it powered on. LaCie is sending us a replacement free of charge since it was basically DOA. But it had excellent reviews. (and our other LaCie drives are great!!!)

My personal external drive (not for our business) is a WD My Book 1TB. My wife has a 2TB version for her stuff. Mine had terrible reviews overall, on the site I got it from, but at the time it was what I could afford and I needed something right away. It's our longest living external. It's never had a problem to date. (Oh, my wife just reminded me we have a Seagate that is a bit older, but it's too small to use ) But my point is, it's really hard to tell from reviews and word of mouth, because they can get amazing reviews (The dead LaCie we got today had amazing reviews where we ordered it from.) or terrible reviews (like our My Book that seems to be wanting to live forever), and your experience can be the opposite, or the same.

Personally, we use Western Digital for our personal, day to day family life stuff. For our home business, we use LaCie mostly. I've had pretty good luck with both, except the drive we got today.

Our shop has had a failure with almost every brand out there but the longest lasting one
so far has been a WD World Book the second longest one is an old Maxtor so you could get a good one or a bad one hard drives all fail at some point especially the ones used
everyday all day long in a business atmosphere. The Lacie d2 I use at home is 5yrs old
but got bad reviews so go figure its a flip of the coin.

Just received a 500gb external from OWC...5400rpm by Hitachi in acrylic case...it's only a few days old but so far..impressed with the quality,quietness,performance. OWC has a great rep. with excellent service and packaging...maybe a little pricey...Their drives are preformatted for Mac and the setup is idiot proof.

codda said:

Just received a 500gb external from OWC...5400rpm by Hitachi in acrylic case...it's only a few days old but so far..impressed with the quality,quietness,performance. OWC has a great rep. with excellent service and packaging...maybe a little pricey...Their drives are preformatted for Mac and the setup is idiot proof.

Click to expand...

Glad to hear this. I ordered a 2TB drive (7200rpm) from them yesterday - should be here on Monday.

Check out this recent thread here on MacForums:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/switcher-hangout/228516-external-drive.html

In short, it's hard to recommend a Western Digital, Seagate, Iomega, or LaCie drive right now. They've all put out some serious clunkers recently.

I've been recommending external hard drives from Other World Computing:
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro FireWire 800/400, eSATA + USB2 external Solutions up to 2.0TB - Plug & Play Quad Interface

Their drives have premium Hitachi internal mechanisms, highly regarded Oxford Semi bridge chips, and they have very competitive prices.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

+1 For the OWC Mercury line. This is also what I generally recommend.

Thank you for all the great input. I'm new to this forum but have already found the responses to come from a genuine desire to share information and experiences.

Thank you Randy for taking the time to share your knowledge and experience. You are very helpful and make me feel welcome.

What are the Xtra Ports on External Drive for?

I have a G-Drive 500GB for my 13 MBP. I also have a FW hub. I connected the External HD directlyo the the laptop and the hub to the remaining FW port. However, the drive isnt recognized when I connect the hub.

What;s the 2nd port for?

Thanks,
F

I have made my own 4tb drive (2tb Raid 1 )

I picked up one of these $119 on sales
Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus RAID-1 [M... (GM8QKIT0GB) at OWC

and Two of these $59 each on shell shocker sale
Newegg.com - HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

trojan614 said:

What;s the 2nd port for?

Thanks,
F

Click to expand...

I purchased the G-Drive 500GB for my MBP 13" as well and I had the same question. Is it to daisy chain multiple drives together?

trojan614 said:

I have a G-Drive 500GB for my 13 MBP. I also have a FW hub. I connected the External HD directlyo the the laptop and the hub to the remaining FW port. However, the drive isnt recognized when I connect the hub.

What;s the 2nd port for?

Click to expand...

The extra Firewire port is for daisychaining Firewire devices. Theoretically you can daisychain a large number of Firewire devices, but in practice I've found that it is unwise to daisychain more than two hard drives together.

There is also some controversy over using Firewire hubs. In practice, sometimes Firewire hubs work with no apparent issues, other times users report having big problems.

I asked an expert about this, the developer of SoftRAID (as he deals with external Firewire issues all the time) and he said that originally Firewire was never supposed to be used in a star configuration (i.e. with a hub). Most of the references that allude to this have been removed from the Internet, but he said that when he has tested Firewire hubs and analyzed what was going on, it was not a good situation. (I have no citations for this, so FWIW. I can post his e-mail to me if anyone feels that they need to see it.)

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________