Reviewers Recommend Big Wet Asses 34 - review by Captain Jack Director: Pat Myne Starring: Vince Karter, Zac Wild, Summer Vixen, Lilith Grace, River Lynn, Victor Ray, Tessa Thomas, Jay Romero. Read review
I'd like to stay but I've got a plane to catch. 3243 Posts 5/06
Posted - Sep 5 2008 : 7:40PM
Thanks to my most recent bonus I am going to be purchasing an external hard drive for back up and additional storage purposes. I'm looking at something in the 250G to 360G range of memory. Any brands to recommend? Possibly more important, any brands to stay the hell away from?
Somewhat depends on if you want just a desktop external HD or a portable version. For portables, I've got a SimpleTech USB 250 for my Windows laptop that has traveled with me all over the world, and a LaCie 250 Firewire portable for the Mac that has seen almost as much travel. Firewire is far faster than USB 2.0 in my experience, although the new SATA ports looks promising if you can find one like that. But if it's a desktop unit, all I can say is [ invalid url ] I've had good luck with a firewire external Seagate for over 2 years now. Others hate the Seagates.
My past is a foreign country. Most things are different there, including word usage. 503 Posts 12/06
Posted - Sep 5 2008 : 8:53PM
I've had great success with factory recon LaCie portable hard drives. I've purchased five over the years (smallest 60 Gb to largest 350 Gb) and all are installed and working (every day), never had a failure or a problem with any of them. Never paid more than $100 for any of them. LaCie - Clearance Hard Drives
+1 LaCie I've been using a 500GB LaCie Quadra (four interfaces -- eSATA, Firewire 800, Firewire 400, and USB 2.0) for the last 8 months. I use the eSATA connection. It's solidly built and fast. I love it. ------------------- [typos] Edited by - bob on 9/6/2008 3:03:04 AM
Bob, how does eSATA compare to Firewire for sustained writes? I use Firewire on the Mac primarily for scratch work when burning my own renders, but my newest Windows laptop came with an eSATA port also and was wondering if it might be faster than Firewire. Thoughts?
My understanding is that eSATA I (1.5Gbits/s) -- which is the interface that my LaCie uses -- is 3 to 4 times faster than Firewire 400 for sustained transfers. The newer LaCie drives use eSATA II (3Gbits/s), which is faster still. I used a Firewire 400 interface with my previous external drive (a Seagate that's still doing good service for my wife) and my backups were significantly slower than they are now.
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the unknown pervert Deactivated User
I'd like to stay but I've got a plane to catch. 3243 Posts 5/06
I use a Maxtor 750 Gig and so far I'm very happy with it.
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NewRomancer Deactivated User
under THEIR avatar 738 Posts 7/08
Posted - Sep 6 2008 : 7:24PM
My Maxtor 300G has been ticking over quite nicely for a few years now... It's firewire as well, so its speed blows USB outa the water! Got a Western Digital 250G "Passport" USB drive at Costco a few weeks ago, for 100 bucks, as supplemental space for my laptop and I FN LOVE this thing!! I love that I can hold my entire mp3 collection in the palm of my hand. I especially love that when the "500g Passport" goes on for less than 100 bucks @ Costco, I'll go buy one, transfer all my files to it, and then return the 250G one for a FULL refund! Did the same thing when I 'upgraded' from 120G to my current 300G Maxtor (Actually I recall that it worked out that they paid me to upgrade) Gotta love Costco!
My past is a foreign country. Most things are different there, including word usage. 503 Posts 12/06
Posted - Sep 7 2008 : 3:10PM
I've said it in other threads on similar topics. I limit my drive sizes to a max of 320 Gb and prefer 250 Gb. Don't like putting too many eggs in one basket. I use Replicate to do my back-ups (it only writes files that have changed or are new) and even with that, backing-up is rather tedious. Backing-up the back-up is even more so.
Any new recommendations? The Seagate ST310005FDA2E1-RK FreeAgent Desk 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive seems to have gotten excellent customer reviews at both Amazon and Best Buy. Anyone disagree?
I have a few external drives. I have a couple from LaCie and never had any problems with them at all. My current favorite is a 'home built' setup: A Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb in an Antec MX-1 eSATA case. The WD Caviar runs quiet and cool. It has two physical platters for a total of 640GB (depending on how you count GB). The Antec eSATA case has a large lowspeed fan in the base which makes no noise but keeps the drive really cool. Cool is good with a hard drive. Now the downside: You gotta' put this together yourself. I have no idea how much of a pain this is for you. It only takes 5 minutes, but some people don't want to mess around with computer hardware -- they just want to plug stuff in and have it work. And some people don't like the retro-look of the Antec case. I on the other hand want to pick the drive and the case. And I really don't spend any time looking at the drive case and I don't mind the look of it all that much. I concede that the LaCie external drives have nicer styling. I move this drive and case from Macintosh to Macintosh (PowerBook to PowerMac and back) with no problem. I do software development on the external drive and can see no performance hit for using eSATA. I have also used Seagate drives with mixed results: their plain drives seem to work okay, but I had some Seagate external drives that wouldn't even spin up and had to be returned to the vendor. Whatever you decide to buy be sure you can return it if it fails. All the hard disk makers churn out a clunker once in a while. Hope this helps --
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the unknown pervert Deactivated User
I'd like to stay but I've got a plane to catch. 3243 Posts 5/06
Posted - Dec 31 2008 : 10:12AM
I went out and got a Western Digital 320 Gb external hard drive a couple of weeks ago.
I have a similar setup for the external drive on my DVR. Except I have the 1TB Western Digital drive. Should my other external drives on my PC, which I use as backup drives, die, I will replace them with internal drives in Antec cases. IMO, the Antec case does a much better job of cooling than the cases that manufacturers use for their own external drives.
My past is a foreign country. Most things are different there, including word usage. 503 Posts 12/06
Posted - Dec 31 2008 : 8:52PM
I was quite concerned with how warm the case felt on my first LACIE when I started to use it years ago.
Apparently they know what they are doing and my fears have proved to be unfounded. I have since purchased four (paid less than $100 for each one) additional LACIE drives (don't like to keep all my eggs in one basket) and they have been running without a hitch for about 14 hours a day (I power them down overnight).
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA $75.00 at NewEgg shipped free Antec MX-1 eSATA case $70.00 at Circuit City Note the the WD drive I bought is the OEM version, which means its a bare drive : no cables, etc. I have never had any problems with OEM drives as compared to the more expensive 'retail' versions with mounting screws, cables etc. I think you can now get the Antec case at Amazon for a few bucks less than I paid at Circuit City. Total was about $145.00 PLUS a few minutes of my time to assemble. But it's the drive I wanted in an actively cooled case ;-) -- hope this helps. Edited by - badkarma on 1/6/2009 1:30:21 AM
The Antec MX-1 is one of those items that has a $30 rebate available at specific stores about 1/3 - 1/2 of the time. I knew that I was going to want to use one when the price of 1TB drives came down to a reasonable level, to use with my DVR. So, when I learned that the Antec had a $30 rebate at Buy.com, I bought it for about $50, which created a net price of $20 for the case.
My past is a foreign country. Most things are different there, including word usage. 503 Posts 12/06
Posted - Jan 11 2009 : 11:13AM
My experience is with LaCie and Kingston DataTraveler Sticks. I try to remember to turn off the LaCie drives before I unplug them, but there have been times when I haven't and also times when both the power cords and/or the USB cables have been disconnected/connected (accidentally or on purpose) while the power switch is in the On postion. I have never lost any data on any of those drives. They are more reliable than I. That's more than I can say for Windows XP.
#SDNY he's all yours. -- Michael Steele 5110 Posts 3/03
Posted - Jan 11 2009 : 2:09PM
If you want to disconnect it while the computer is still on, click on the "safely remove hardware" icon in the taskbar (lower right corner of screen). If the icon isn't there, go Start --> Run . . . rundll32 shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll to restore it. If you get a error message indicating that the drive can't be removed at this time, make sure that you have everything involving any files on that drive shut down, including any Windows Explorer window showing the contents of the drive.
#SDNY he's all yours. -- Michael Steele 5110 Posts 3/03
Posted - Jan 16 2009 : 5:06AM
My 400 GB Seagate drive just self-destructed. It instantaneously went from working perfectly to sounding like a marble rattling around in a gallon can. The Seagate diagnostic program can't even read it. And, naturally, I have no backup for it. Fucking computers. Back everything up. That is all.
Hard drives are designed to work in fairly warm environments, The manufacturer will list the operating temperatures: the WD 1TB drive is rated at an operating temperature of 130F.If this in an external enclosure the problem might be the power supply for the enclosure rather than the drive itself. I have more problems (as in 6:1 or worse) with enclosure power supplies over problems with hard disks. Put the drive in a different enclosure with a different power supply and see if it works there.All rotating-media storage devices today that I know of are slower than 1.5Gb/s, and SATA I is faster than they are. SATA II 3Gb/s speeds are only needed for "port multiplier" setups where more than one drive is connected to the cable. It turns out that SSD (Flash) drives can sometimes sustain *very* high throughput, at the top of the SATA II 3GB/s. But those are quite pricey. SATA III will support 6 Gb/s because SSDs already need such speeds, and because port multipliers can use 6 Gb/s. A drive connected via eSATA should run at the same speed as if it were an internal drive since eSATA is essentially SATA. The fastest drives I've used will do just over 100 MB/s on (e)SATA, around 60 MB/s on Firewire 800 and 30 MB/s USB, with Firewire and USB results depending on the operating system. If external hard disks are mirrored for reliability it's a good idea if possible to put the drives in different enclosures with different power supplies.
#SDNY he's all yours. -- Michael Steele 5110 Posts 3/03
Posted - Jan 17 2009 : 1:02AM
The update part at the end of the Tom's article actually links to this Seagate webpage, which seems to be talking about a larger group of drives that potentially need a firmware upgrade. The drive that died isn't on this list, but the most recent Seagate drive I bought is, so thanks for bringing this to my attention, Bill.It wasn't in an external enclosure. I just posted in this thread to make the point that backups are important. (And because it was 2:00 a.m., and I was still too pissed off to go to sleep.)
Big Wet Asses 34 - review by Captain Jack
Posted - Sep 5 2008 : 7:40PM
Fucking computers. 
