scratch disk – eSATA or LaCie?

[Somalinis]

It’s enough Lacie unless you’re working with uncompressed footage.

[Vince Becquiot]

Let me make this an objective comment. If you buy a LaCie, buy another one for back up.

Vince

[Jeaster]

Please explain more!

Why?
Can you recommend a scratch disk setup?
What do you use?

[Vince Becquiot]

My comment was regarding the reliability of this particular brand, which we have to recognize is cheap, thus my “backup” suggestion. In practice, I do see many of these go bad, just as I see a lot of Western Digital go bad.

I have nothing against the brand, but these drives just aren’t build for constant access, such as rendering. I like Seagate, although I did have one crash on me this year, so I may revise that review later on 😉

Cheers

Vince

[Mat @ lacie]

Hi Vincent,
Hope you are doing well. Just want to react to your comment.
Our products are being used (and abused:) everyday by thousands of pro-users in the video and music industry. We work hard to achieve the best reliability possible. Considering the number of drives that we ship every year, it’s only normal that you hear more often about LaCie than other manufacturers of ext. drives.

If “cheap” was a reference to our pricing, it’s simply because our volume allows us to be more aggressive.

Hope this helps.
Mat @ LaCie.

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Mat,

Thank for your reply. My reference was unfortunately quite personal. We bought 5 external Lacie drives about 3 years ago, 2 are still standing, 1 running quite hot. Call it bad luck, or a bad batch, but you’ll have to admit that I have a reason to be a little biased when we are putting 100’s of hours of work on each one of these drives for archiving. Ours are basically standing on a shelf, and never moved. They are however running more than just a few hors a day, if that’s what you are referring to as abuse 😉

At home I have three Internal Seagates (these weren’t cheap priced may I add) in my personal editing tower, and 3 external that I use to transfer footage and that’s being moved almost everyday. One internal did fail as I said, the others are doing fine.

As I said in my previous post, I have nothing against your brand, or Western digital for that matter, simply going from my personal experience, and that of several post I’ve seen in other Forum.

I’ d love to hear for others experience so that we can balance this whole thing a little.

Cheers,

Vince

[Tcindie]

I had bad luck with both a seagate and a lacie drive.. The lacie I think was due to a lack of cooling, without a fan in the case after a lot of accessing it gets hot. It’s not my drive, it was something I had borrowed from a friend.. I think the controller was a bit flaky too, because I was only able to access the drive reliably — when I used it — by cracking open the case, and taking the drive out to use with a different controller.

My seagate was a worse situation.. Everything would be chugging along just fine and out of the blue I’d hear a clunk, then get a delayed write error and the system wouldn’t recognize the drive anymore until I cycled the power on the external enclosure. At first it struck me as being a problem with the controller and perhaps my computer, but it turned out the drive itself was bad. Although the SMART data shows it to be fine, it’s got some significant physical problems.

Long story short.. I only use external drives as an absolute last resort. Personally, I loathe them. I’ve had much better luck with internals, and you can always get the hot swap SATA’s, and a case that supports the hot swapping sleds, etc. For whatever reason, internal just works better for me.

[Jeaster]

I eventually bought a external SATA drive. Samsung SpinPoint 250GB, 7200RPM and a Vantec NexStar enclosure. I’ll let you know if I have problems. Thanks for the advice

[Mike Cohen]

we use these enclosures (very affordable) and Seagate SATA drives. It is a low cost reliable solution – lots cheaper than buying standalone external drive units. Why buy the USB/SATA interface everytime you buy a drive?
So far so good anyway.
https://www.cooldrives.com/esata-usb-enclosure-removable.html
Mike

[Ahunter]

Mike is absolutely right. We also use the above mantioned enclosures (3 to be exact @1.2TB per) and I have to say to work like a charm. However with that said, they are hard drives and for that reason alone anything can go wrong. Regarding LaCie…I had purchased several units for a client in Isreal, ship him the units with projects loaded on them and one was dead within 45 days. Bad unit? Effects of Shipping? User abuse? Its hard to say. This is why we use a mix of storage solutions, including backing up material to DVD-ROM.

Alan