External HD Drives

Just had one of my external HD drives die this morning ... What a pain in the arse!!!

The only good thing is that at least I have dv tape back up, but I really am not looking forward to recapturing all the footage!

Anyways I've been reading about different HD drives and Lacie and Seagate seam to either get great reviews or really bad ones. I really need about 1TB of data storage at the moment has anyone got any quality products that they use or any that are crap?

Jon

Hey Jonny,

Have you considered one of G-Technology's units

I just ordered one of these myself.

G-Speed ES

They've got several size options and you can connect via a RAID host adapter.

I won't use anything but LaCies. They're as rugged as they come. I've dropped them from 6 feet onto concrete (accident) and dragged them around the world in a backpack and subjected them to the worst temperature/moisture extremes I could imagine in our work environment. They have never, ever let me down.

I use also Lacie. First I had 2x d2 500 GB, but one crashed after 1 one year (no clue why)

Now I use a Lacie 2 big Dual 1 TB with no problems so far.

Those G-speeds look pretty mac daddy, I have actually managed to chuck my dead HD drive into a new casing and it's up and running again. I do need to sort something out asp though.

The lacie 1TB also seams pretty good but I has heard rumours that their drives over 500 had a few problems.

Cheers for all the info

Jon

Jonny

Are you looking for portable/travel solutions or home use?

For home use, consider using Addonics Port Multipliers. With these gadgets, you can use an old PC case ( which can be bought at the local Salvation Army or 2nd hand store) and install up to 10 drives. There is a hardware RAID version which is only a tad bit faster for random read/writes (mostly due to the processor overheads)

For drives, I now use the Western Digital RE2-GP drives now. They use about 40% less electricity than normal drives and are only about 10-15MB/s slower. With a 6 drive RAID 0, I can still use them for 4:4:4 HD uncompressed or even 2k work.

I will say that the 1TB drives have been less than reliable thus far. Eric Cheng had 2 of 6 Hitachi 1TB DOA. I just added 2 1TB WD RE2-GP as a test for reliability vs the 750GB I have already.

For portable location solutions, editing in ProRes 422 with FW800 drives, I use the La Cie Little Big Disk (limitations: IDE/PATA connection so 500GB is max support for now). The Gtech Mini uses SATA so they can be upgraded to 640GB (2x320GB 2.5" drives) but it's a lot more expensive.

The last location we were at, the HD engineer had a minitower eSATA connection to the editing laptop to process dailies in AVC for satelite transmission to the production big wigs.

I have (have had) 10 LaCie drives from the 160GB ruggeds (2) right through the 250GB, 500GB and 3 RAID 1TB and 2TB drives.

Of the 10, 4 have crashed completely and have been replaced by LaCie but all data lost and unrecoverable. The RAIDs have been flawless but i won't buy another LaCie.

My latest is a Seagate 500GB and it is doing well so far.

I give my drives a pretty hard life (life on live aboards) so they die faster than they normally would but 4 out of 10 failures is pretty weak. And yes I am a slow learner

I actually just bought a 500 gig lacie... just read your post Josh bugger!!...but it was cheap pretty cheap and I just wanted to back up my most important footage / files etc. It is staying on my desk, so hopefully it will be ok!

Do you guys turn off your drives at night, I've been pretty lazy and leave them on probably not great for them.

To be honest I reckon I will look at a decent dedicated RAID system but just need to hold off a couple of months ... just need to earn some more cash!

I only have mine on when I need to access the raw files. The very cool thing about LR is that one can access all ones pix w/o the files on board. Only needed for 'developing' and creating output.

BTW are you all aware that Firewire 3200 and USB 3.0 are due out soon? I would not 'overbuy'. B)

T

I'll never purchase another LCie drive!!

'Nuff said.

Hello all,

I've been using these external firewire drives for awhile now and would highly recommend them. I'm in no way affiliated with them. I used to buy LaCie but had trouble with several and decided to look elsewhere.

1 TB of RAID storage for $350 with a 5 year warranty, 2years repair or replacement, they can't be beat. Firewire 800 400 and USB2.0.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20Wor...g/ME8SRS10TB32/

I've got quite of few of these and they've always been very reliable so far.

Good Luck