Suggestions for External Drives

[Harm Millaard]

This is a similar question to what is the best car for the budget? Lots of opinions and no certainties. Some like BMW, Cadillac, Lexus, Mercedes, Porsche, etc. each for their own reason. About LaCie I’ve read a number of negative stories, but YMMV. I don’t think you will get a good answer here, but check StorageReview. There may be some reliability reports there.

[Robert Hallion]

Thanks for the reply Harm. I understand that everyone has a different opinion and different experiences with drives. But I would still like to hear others opinions on what they are using and how the drives had faired. StorageReview.com is an ok site, but not very up to date and also doesn’t talk much about external drives. I understand that an external drive is just the internal drives they are reviewing in an enclosure but the enclosure can cause a lot of problems, which is what we are having. We (the editing community) use external drives differently then most people considering the large files that we transfer back and forth. So it would be nice to hear from other professionals instead of people who just use drives to backup pictures and documents.

Anyway, like I said if I could get some different opinions on what people are using that would be great

[Blast1]

[typpeo] “I understand that an external drive is just the internal drives they are reviewing in an enclosure but the enclosure can cause a lot of problems, which is what we are having.”
Are the drives you are using out of warranty? What kind of problems are the enclosures causing? Do you do alot of hot swapping?

[typpeo] “I could get some different opinions on what people are using that would be great”
I prefer to buy external enclosures and drives separately, that way you can get a much better warranty as most branded external drives are 1yr and internal drives are 3-5yrs depending on brand and size.
Like Harm mentioned everyone will have a different opinion of what’s best, over the years I’ve used different brands in intergrating systems with no particular brand standing out except one brand which got out of the drive business after much bad karma, I currently use KingWin eSATA enclosures with Maxtor 500gig drives, as I find there is less trouble keeping drive assignments sorted out, and data xfer problems then there is with USB and firewire drives.

[Robert Hallion]

Thanks Blast1 that might be a good idea, just to buy and internal drive and place it in an enclosure.

We had one drive actually catch fire; it was the wiring in the enclosure. The other aren

[Paul Hawkridge]

Hi there,

I thought I would chip in as you wanted to find out about a MyBook. I bought a 500GB MyBook, Pro i think it was (its got firewire). I use it as my main media drive now as I often have to take my laptop with me to a clients hq.
So far it has performed well with various DV projects. Its got about 7 on it at the moment. The fact that it switches on and off with the computer is for me a really good touch. It will also power down if it hasnt been used for a while, it will stay connected etc but just not spin until you use it again. Its a great feature to hopefully increase its life and it only takes acouple of seconds to power up again.

Only problem i’ve had is with a large HDV project (60mb proj file but 160GB work files). Towards the end it would take a long time for the project to load then when you were in, if you clicked out of premiere and back in it would sort of load up again. I’m not sure if that was partly to do with premiere or just the fact that the project had got so big. If someone could shed some light on that it would be nice.

I have heard too many horror stories about Lacie’s to consider buying one and the Mybook has been pretty faithful.

Hope that helps

[Robert Hallion]

Thanks for the input Paul. I use a MyBook at home just for backups and I was wondering how well it would hold up. We basically just use them for local storage while we are working on several projects. The network is so slow it just makes life a lot easier.

Thanks again.

[Steve Mac kenzie]

I just wanted to let you know that I use a My Book Pro 500 GB drive and it has outlasted 2 Seagate Esata Drives. It is not as sexy as other options and somewhere a tech junkie is seeking counseling because someone may still be using a slower interface than SCSI or ESATA but I have cut 50 weekly shows or so using this drive for my raw video footage. This drive has paid for itself many times over and though to some it may seem pedestrian I have never once had to call their tech support in the badlands of India and work to escalate the problem so I can be transferred back to America to get a resolution. Again there are many many choices out there that may seem more seductive and to a degree they are but there are also pitfalls with quality, compatibility, included 3rd party bundled cards, and even the vaunted tier 3 support. This is the reason while my My Book Pro is still on the front lines.
Steve