2TB bare drives, brand of choice?

[Michael Kammes]

For local use….

For what use? Word docs or video editing?

For video editing, bare minimum for reliable performance is 7200 RPM. Yes, plenty of people use sub 7200RPM, but I’ve never felt that was reliable enough, especially when using ‘fatter’ codecs.

Larger Cache is also always desired.

As far as brands, each manufacturer has small batches prone to mistakes, and I’ve never been able to stick with 1 brand permanently. For me, it;s always been a crap shoot, more based on the cooling of the system and ventilation.

On a side note, I’m a fan of 3 2TB drives in a Mac Pro. RAID 2 of them for performance, then use the 3rd drive for Time Machine / Backup of the other 2 RAID drives.

.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior applications editor . post workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
.: michaelkammes.com

[Caspian Brand]

I would definitely recommend 7200RPM drives for anything.
Personally I’ve gone so far as to swap out drives in my laptop and MacMini for 7200RPM drives as well, as it will even provide a slight performance advantage in that domain as well.

I’d say go with the Hitachi or Seagate (buy a 7200RPM model).

Regarding “enterprise class” this usually distinguishes between RAID capable drives vs. drives used in a standalone state.

Do you intend to throw some type of RAID across these drives or are you just going to use them as JBOD?

If you’re just going to manage everything in Disk Utility and do the software stripe across two drive approach mentioned by Michael with the third drive as a time machine backup (which is a nice workflow, good call Michael) then I would think you’d be allright with the standard “desktop” drives.

Another option would be to install an inexpensive RAID controller where you could potentially set up a RAID 5 across 3 drives, or setup a Hardware RAID 1 Mirror across two of the drives for extra redundancy.

Again, whatever you choose to do, at minimum stick with the 7200RPM drives for any sort of media work.

-Caspian Brand

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Mark Raudonis]

Thanks for the info, gentlemen.

No raid here. These are for ancient G5’s that are one step away from the recycle bin, yet still have some useful life in them for “light weight” editing.

As I research this, I find that every brand has it’s fans, detractors, and stories to tell.

Mark

[Bob Zelin]

In that case – anything.

For professional systems, I have been using Hitachi only since my Seagate fiasco in 2009, but people I trust like Bryson Jones and others have been telling me how teriffic the new Western Digital drives are (and Apple is using WD now also, almost exclusively).

So bottom line answer – anything but Seagate (and Seagate may “work” now, but I still don’t trust them).

Bob Zelin

[Eric Hansen]

i agree with everyone here. i had the exact same experience as Bob with Seagate and they’ll never get my business again.

another vote for 7200RPM drives. not because of the usual reasons, but because of the new wave of “green” drives. they will be 5400 or they won’t say what speed they are. they spin down to save energy and they make the computers pause (beachball of death) as the drives spin back up. as green as i like to think i am, i can’t stand a slow computer.

btw, awesome time of year to buy this sort of thing. bare hard drives are loss leaders for many stores.

e

Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Jim Curtis]

I know this makes me look like a rube, but I’ve been using 8 2TB Seagate Constellation SAS drives in my RAID 5 for a month and a half now. My ATTO Configuration Tool does a Media Scan with Verify every night at 2 AM, and after 44 scans, it’s reported 0 errors on all 8 drives. However, these are enterprise drives.

I also had 8 of the infamous 7200.11 Seagates in my RAID before this, and they performed admirably for over a year. I had one go bad early, under warranty. But, other than that, no problems.

From what I read on the Seagate site, if you had one of the “bad” 7200.11 drives, it was a “brick,” or IOW, wouldn’t function at all. The real problem with that fiasco, as I recall it, was that Seagate denied there was a problem for months, to great outcry, before they admitted and addressed the problem, and released firmware updates (PC only, which further infuriated Mac customers). It was a PR nightmare for Seagate, and as you can see here, some people are still upset with Seagate’s poor response, and not getting over it any time soon.

Jim Curtis
jamesphilipcurtis.com

MacPro (Harpertown-Early 2008) 2×4 3GHz; 32G RAM all the same brand; 10.6.3; QT 7.6.6; FCS3; Kona LHi in PCI slot 3 (8.0.1); Primary display: 30″ ACD; Secondary: HP LP2480zx DreamColor (A) via AJA HDP2 SDI to HDMI converter and (B) DVI from MacPro.