Experience with external drives?

Hi,

I have to buy some external drives for a documentary production company here in NY, and I'm wondering if either of these brands are preferable?

My employer was thinking of getting some LaCie drives, but I found some Western Digital 2TB My Book Studio Edition II drives for a lower price. These drives would be used mainly for backing up data acquired in the field...in other words, they'd travel quite a bit too. We'd probably store them in Pelican cases and hook them up to a laptop for backing up.

Has anyone had any issues with these?

Thanks for any help!

To be perfectly honest...based on my experience...you couldn't have listed 2 more troublesome & useless drives. Garbage, IMHO. I recommend CalDigit as they use Hitachi high performance drives in them and their Tech Support is awesome.

Not to hijack the thread, but I happen to have 2 Caldigit external RAID units for sale on this forum (see the details below). They have hot swappable drive sleds so you can purchase huge drives up to 2 TB:

[www.lafcpug.org]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Good thing you posted this in the morning, when most people are busy working (or in other time zones, sleeping or drinking heavily). Otherwise you'd have about twenty replies full of screaming.

Don't buy consumer gear for this. You'll just be throwing your money away. For this, you really want something like the Caldigit VR, or the new VR mini if you prefer something bus-powered.

(Dammit, I wasn't fast enough. Joey beat me.)

I wouldn't recommend LaCie BigDisks at all - not for historically bad reasons but also because against my recommendations a client bought them and has already had 1 go down on them with all the data.

I would however recommend the LaCie Rugged HDDs which are small lightweight and designed to travel well and they are Bus Powered so for backup or laptop editing are great when you don't have 100% access to power.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

you have opened THE most passionate topic in lafcpug.

lacie and mybook products have THE HIGHEST failure rates out there - at least on a word of mouth basis. you could argue that they have the most failure reports because they are the most available products out there (they can be purchased at just about ANY retail store you can think of). with that many more products in circulation, it only figures that they would also have the highest number of complaints, right?

may be. but i had two identical lacie drives fail back to back on me.

about the only three brands of drives that ive NEVER heard failure reports from are OWC, caldigit and glyph.

here are links to some of your safest bets.

[www.macsales.com]
look at their "mercury elite" products

[www.glyphtech.com]

[www.caldigit.com]

You don't always need to go the HIGH END route for archiving. The CalDigit VR drives are great for solid media drives, and if you can afford to use them as archive drives, they are also fantastic. Not everyone can do this, however, so you need other options. LaCie is very hit and miss, mainly because you don't know WHAT drive they put in their enclosures, but the Rugged drives are generally solid. But the other ones...I wouldn't throw rocks at them. And MyBook drives are not what I'd use for media storage. Home backup of files and pictures, maybe.

Go to otherworldcomputing.com and look at those drives. They are good for archiving. Or if you are a do-it-yourselfer like me, get really good HITACHI drives and then buy external encosures and assemble them yourself. Cheaper, and you know you are getting a good hard drive.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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I'd have to side with Joe. The two brands you listed above have a really horrible track record compared to others.

Now, to backpedal a bit, any drive can fail if you use them often enough. Nature of the beast. But the recommendations of Ben, Jeff Harrell and Shane are sound.

Don't try to save $50 now for an inferior drive. You'll pay out hundreds, even thousands later for lost data, labour costs to get the project back on track, time costs for a poorly performing drive, and don't forget...if the cheap one crashes and burns, you'll have to buy a quality replacement drive to replace it. You'll end up paying for many times the meagre savings you got by going Lacie or Western Digital.

Be farsighted. Get quality.


www.derekmok.com

We just completed a RED project on the Caldigit HD Element and it was a fully joyous experience.

[www.caldigit.com]

And yes LaCie and WD blow chunks.

-Noah

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And yes LaCie and WD blow chunks

That might make a good print ad for G-tech or CalDigit.




Michael Horton
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Thanks for the replies...I'll look into the link Shane had. Again, this is mostly to back-up stuff we're shooting overseas; so the idea is, we have multiple copies of everything while we're there, then travel/fly back home with everything, then copy our footage on to drives we've already got here that aren't so portable.

the lacie drives that fried my content. did it on contact.

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And yes LaCie and WD blow chunks

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That might make a good print ad for G-tech or CalDigit.

Caldigit:



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

For what it's worth, I have a 500gig Maxtor drive (had it since dec. 2006)
and a 1 terabite Iomega (since dec 2008), I have had no problems with either.

i have 3 maxtors purchased in the last 18 months. two of those have mounting problems. one of which gave me a message saying it was about to fail.

i have 5 iomega drives that all work great, though two of them have REALLY noisy fans. to iomegas credit they have agreed to replace those enclosures for free.