[phillyman]

Hi,

I'm about to buy another external hard drive and luckily never had trouble with them. Up until now I went with the cheapest, which offered both firewire and usb2. I've had the iomega mini max (white which look like the mini) which I've found a tad noisy but otherwise very good and a Lacie d2 Quadra Hard Disk (aluminum) , which has been pretty quiet and fine to use.

I was wondering if anyone had a specific recommandation and why. I use the drives to store media files, backups, etc. I would particularly be interested in "silent/quiet" drives. If there really is no difference I would tend to go with the cheaper drive but at the same time don't mind spending more for piece of mind.

At first glance I was looking at the Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II or again the Lacie d2 Quadra Hard Disk. I'm open to trying something else if people really favor another brand/model.

Thanks for the input,

Phillyman

[mdawson]

OWC has several external drives to choose from and they avoid selling crapware. The bonus with OWC is that they bother to inform the buyer of the drive mechanism used in their enclosures as well as designing enclosures that are user-serviceable; that is, you can typically replace the drive mechanism without voiding the warranty. Also, most of the enclosures they offer are also available as bare cases so you can add the hard drive mechanism of your choosing.

Also, unlike most other external drives on the market all hard drives sold through OWC are pre-formatted for the Mac. Just about any other external drive that you purchase will be pre-formatted as an NTFS volume for Windows.

[dougster]

-Hi,

I usually go with the Lacie d2 Quadra, but there's a good price at ClubMac for the Iomega 500GB, but not 800 firewire.

[sturgisrun]

I will 'second' mdawson about OWC.
I have a almost 4 month old iMac & although I have 8 External HDs ( mostly WD & Seagate ) around I elected to buy The 1 TB ( same size as my internal HD) MiniStack v3 from them.

I bought it for the following reasons:


#1-> Has FW400 / FW800 / USB2.0 connections.


#2-> It is a Hub & has multiple USB & FW ports. I like this because I bought both a LONG USB & FireWire cables & run BOTH to my iMac. I put it about 8-10 feet away where I have 2 Printers plugged into the USB & I use the FW800 to connect to Time machine for MUCH swifter Back-Ups with Time Machine. Since it is so far away I have NEVER heard it- I can only tell it is running if the Blue lite is flashing.


#-3> As mdawson said OWC tells me the I have a Hitachi HD inside & what model ( I even got a $10 rebate pending from Hitachi).


#4-> I liked the fact that it was formatted for the Mac OS & works flawlessly with Time Machine.


#5-> Since it is a Hub I have the option of hooking up a Back-Up HD to my Back-Up HD.


#6-> My on-line+Phone experience with OWC confirmed how good their support & Customer Service.


I may have spent a little more money but I consider it WELL worth it with all the featuress, quality of both Hardware & Service.





Just my $.02 worth . . .


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From the High desert of New Mexico . . .

sturgisrun -> Terry


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[phillyman]

thanks for the information... Here the funny/sad part. My first external drive was an OWC! I passed that drive onto my girlfriend and forgot all about it ;-( ! Yes those drives are nice and the customer service was excellent.

Thanks for the reminder/tip! Now to the reliability/quality of the internal drives. Any make you would recommend or does it really not make a difference?

thanks for the information.
Phillyman

[mdawson]

Hard drives are mechanical devices with very tight tolerances, so eventually they will fail regardless of the model or make.

That stated, many IT people I know swear by Seagate?s desktop drives closely followed by IBM?IBM?s hard drive division was purchased by Hitachi several years back. Many times I have seen the same sentiment on tech forums. Western Digital had a bad rap due to some issues nearly a decade ago. Of course, I did purchase a 120 GB Western Digital drive to use in my Power Mac G4 Cube a little over 5 years ago because it was on sale at CompUSA for (at the time) an unbeatable price. That drive is still chugging away in one of my miniStack enclosures.

Most of the bare drives I have purchased over the past several years have been Hitachi?s, but I would have just as easily gone for a Seagate if the price were better. OWC seems to stick with those two brands also unless they have no other choice based on their current bare drive offerings. For instance, any of OWC?s 2 TB single-drive externals use Western Digital drives, as OWC?s offerings from Hitachi max out at 1 TB and those from Seagate max out at 1.5 TB.

Again, as I mentioned earlier and sturgisrun confirmed, true to the Mac platform, OWC habitually sets the bar pretty high for the products they sell. The fact that OWC has a preference for those two brands is indicative of what they consider to be reliable.

[phillyman]

Perfect!
I've looked at the specs of the drives and will probably pick the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro model . Seems to fit my needs quite nicely. ;-)

Thanks for the recommandations and info about Hitachi and Seagate..
hope everyone has a nice weekend,
Cheers,
Phillyman

[smax013]

mdawson said:

Just about any other external drive that you purchase will be pre-formatted as an NTFS volume for Windows.

In my experience, it is usually a FAT32 format.

[smax013]

I will also offer up OWC as a good choice. While I have not bought any actual external drives from them, I have bought external drive enclosures from them (I tend to "build" my own external drives these days). I have bought their Mercury On-The-Go Pro enclosure with FW400/800 & USB. I also bought a Newer Tech RAID 1 desktop enclosure from them.

I also tend to like LaCie drives. Before I started "building" my own drives, I would buy LaCie drives.

[Martian]

If you find a drive already formated for Mac, it still probably won't use the partition table you need if you ever want it to be bootable. To be bootable, you need a GUID partition format for an Intel Mac and the other one (is it "APM" ?) to boot a PowerPC.