External HD recs?

Jonny_Paycheck

Hai guyz, so the time has come to replace/upgrade my two externals - ones an old WD used strictly for time machine, the other a slightly less old Lacie that holds my mp3 library and various other music projects/files.

Ive heard horror stories about damn near every brand/make but I thought maybe there was some consensus on best/worst in 2013

Brian

how much you looking to spend bruv
and what connex u need
size 2

Okem

I have two of the WD mac drives, never had a problem with either. touch wood.

I also bought their network drive version, MyBook Live I think it's was called. It was painfully slow. In theory it seemed a good idea, so all my music, movies etc would be available to any device on the network, only in practice it completely sucked. I would recommend you don't waste your time and money on that one.

If you want to store anything digitally that you couldn't bare loosing maybe pay the extra cash and buy a solid state drive, or use cloud storage. But if it's just your mp3s you're worried about loosing maybe just buy a small portable drive, they're pretty cheap these days, and just use that as a back up.

Jimster

Use 3 WD drives, newest one must be 3 years old, all work fine. Have a 2TB one in a Syabas Popcorn Hour box, that gets powered off from the mains in a harsh fashion and it's never complained.

I guess it's like cars, no brand is without it's downsides...

Jonny_Paycheck

PatrickCrazy said:

how much you looking to spend bruv
and what connex u need
size 2

Ideally 750GB to 1TB

Looking to spend not a huge amount

Prolly have to be USB, would like a f/w option doe

Jonny_Paycheck

I should clarify that I'm just upgrading b/c my two drives are relatively old, small, and slow. They're starting to give me trouble but never did before.

dreskieboogie

I worked with G-Raid, WD, Lacie and Glyph. Never had a problem with either so I'm not sure it really matters which company you go with. I think Glyph have pretty good support and G-Raid's are easy to use as a mirrored drive = back up related.

ppadilha

dreskieboogie said:

I worked with G-Raid, WD, Lacie and Glyph. Never had a problem with either so I'm not sure it really matters which company you go with. I think Glyph have pretty good support and G-Raid's are easy to use as a mirrored drive = back up related.

I work mostly with G-Raid and Lacie drives, had problems with Glyph in the past but I've also seen Lacie drives crap out. Difference was the Lacie ones tended to crap out right out of the box.

Can't imagine you need anything fancy for the back-up/time machine one. For music I would think a 5400rpm drive would be fast enough OR you could get a solid state HD - those are faster and way sturdier but can get expensive if you're looking at something like 1TB of storage. Also, with the exception of some Lacie ones these brands usually require an external power source. If you're looking for something that travels easily there's the Lacie rugged drives, just don't be fooled by the name - they're not as rugged as they look.

soup

I deal with large amounts of media for my job and unfortunately often have to use firewires to travel with it. All drives fail. Glyph and Rocstor are what I usually use but I don't want to try and count the number that have failed on me.

For home use I got tired of trying to keep up my backup of my archive and use a raid-1 (mirrored drives) for everything so I don't have to think about it anymore. I have this but after having to replace a drive and almost losing all my data because of the idiotic way it's designed I don't recommend it,

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax

I've been wanting to get one of these instead because I could replace a drive while stoned, drunk and naked and not fuck anything up which is my primary design consideration.

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10598