external drive for MAC Tower

Hi Everyone,
I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions about a great reliable/sturdy external hard drive? I will be
using it to keep HD footage on and edit from.
Thanks for you inputs,
Dee

You can do it with a single drive but i would suggest a raid enclosure that will allow 0,1,5,10 Raid protocols. In this realm you can get ……


> 4Bay Mercury Elite Pro from OWC. [eshop.macsales.com]

> Caldigit HD Element - [www.caldigit.com] (more expensive but very very reliable)

> G-Tech G-Speed 4bay - [www.bhphotovideo.com]

You could also just get 3 more internal drives. One could be 4TB and the other 2 can be as much as 2TB(maximum) then set the 2x2tb drive to copy to the 4TB. and you would have some redundancy backing up your data.

I am not a fan of Seagate as it is the only drive ever to quit on me (some swear by it). But Western Digital is decent and i have always loved Hitachi which is now HGST. HGST is owned by Western Digital be the 2 drives are not the same. HGST still has the lowest failure rate. So, you can depend on them blindly for a solid 4-6years.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Thanks so much for your input, the detail was terrific!

Dee: if you choose to use external drives you must also consider how they will be connected to the computer. Mac towers have slow USB 2.0 ports and faster FireWire 800 ports. But even FireWire 800 is not fast enough to reap the full speed of a good single hard drive, much less a RAID array. You can edit HD footage with Firewire 800 connection speed but it can bog down where there are multiple video layers. You will reap more of the external hard drive's speed using a faster connection type: either eSATA or USB 3.0. You equip your tower for one of these connection types by installing an approximately $50 PCIe card. Some PCIe cards offer ports with both types.

I prefer to buy single 3.5" hard drives and their enclosures separately. The advantage is flexibility. When a edit is finished (for the while) the drive can be removed from the enclosure and shelved. Another drive, perhaps of different capacity, can take the first drive's place in the enclosure. I confess that the fixturing of the drives in the enclosures does not look as robust as what I've seen inside enclosures that came with their drives. So handle the self-assemblies gently.

As for data redundancy I prefer manual backups on a completely separate hard drive that I store in another room, or even at another address. For critical projects I make two separate back up drives. Much depends on what you want the data redundancy protection from. If it's from hard drive failure, then the RAID arrays protect you (unless the RAID circuitry fails) more conveniently than separate drives. If it's from fire, theft, accident the RAID arrays don't protect you, while separate drives do. If it's from human error -- erasing what you shouldn't, etc. -- the RAID arrays don't protect you. When making separate back ups you often catch the error, and save your bacon.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Thank you Dennis, that's alot of great info!