G-Drives versus Western Digital-LaCie-etc.

[Frank Petronio]

In looking for "better than the cheapest but not paying through the nose" external hard-drives I found these G-Drives. Pro photographer Chase Jarvis gushes all over them but I bet they sent him quite a few freebies.... check the page/video for his back-up strategy:

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2006/12/important-storage-and-backup-solutions-for-your-photography/

And obviously they're Hitachi drives... http://g-technology.com/ in an Apple-inspired case.

Worth spending a few bucks more?

As an aside, damn, that guy does nice pictures but not anything that's significantly better than a lot of other togs... it really shows you how having a "can-do", smart, positive attitude is what really makes the difference in being successful as a pro photographer.

[vinny]

I can't speak from personal experience but every tapeless video production I've been on in the last year or so has used them for dumping their data from cards.

[bdkphoto]

In looking for "better than the cheapest but not paying through the nose" external hard-drives I found these G-Drives. Pro photographer Chase Jarvis gushes all over them but I bet they sent him quite a few freebies.... check the page/video for his back-up strategy:

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2006/12/important-storage-and-backup-solutions-for-your-photography/

And obviously they're Hitachi drives... http://g-technology.com/ in an Apple-inspired case.

Worth spending a few bucks more?

As an aside, damn, that guy does nice pictures but not anything that's significantly better than a lot of other togs... it really shows you how having a "can-do", smart, positive attitude is what really makes the difference in being successful as a pro photographer.


I would roll your own. The ability to choose an enclosure and buy your own drives out- weighs the all-in-one features of the g drive IME. (it is a good reliable drive). It comes down to a few basics, the chipset for the interface - usb, firewire, or esata, cooling, and the drives themselves. I have found that these guys are an amazing resource- www.macgurus.com - and they carry good gear and have great service. I have opted for the flexibility of swapping out drives when they fill up or fail (they will fail). If you are going to spend a bit more this is the route I would take as it will give you the opportunity to build a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system that fits your workflow and costs less over time.

I admire Chase and his work, but there are smarter guys out there giving advice on DAM workflow. Here's a good starting point www.dpbestflow.org

[Lenny Eiger]

In looking for "better than the cheapest but not paying through the nose" external hard-drives.

Frank,
I have many Terabytes of storage (and backup) here, and have been building my own RAID's since the early '90's.

To begin, I will never buy a LaCie product again as long as I live. Their primary issue is with their power bricks, but the idea of selling a 1-2 TB drive RAID as if it was a non-RAID drive is very out of integrity. Mine have all failed.

For internal drives I can recommend only Seagate at this point. I don't recommend Hitachi or Western Digital. Seagate's have been the best performers in the "last the longest" category around here. The Barracuda 7200 rpm series has been manufactured for quite some time and they have this down.

The least expensive way is to build your own. Choose a case (empty) and fill it with your choice of internal drives. All you have to do is screw in the 4 screws that attach a drive to its bracket and slide it in... The last one I bought was a Sonnet and it works very well. Others are great also...

I have used a product called SoftRAID (a mac product) to set up all kinds of RAID types. It works very well, good support, etc. It's $129 or $139. Must be something similar on a PC.

I respectfully disagree with MacGurus contention that mirroring isn't the way to go. I have two RAID's on this computer, a 5-bay Sonnet case that I filled with 1TB drives, largest at the time and another 4-bay case from Firmtek that has 10K RPM Seagtes for high speed. The 5-bay is a multi-domain, which means it all goes over one wire. I was concerned that this would be slower than the other. The difference when working on a Photoshop file is imperceptible.

I think that we all need two drives, one small and fast, maybe 100Gigs, for the largest files, for a scratch disk, and another larger repository drive. I suggest a mirrored setup.

The great thing about mirror's is that you can remove on of the mirrored drives, have a full backup of everything - and stick it in a safety deposit box, say every year or so. You put in a replacement drive and it rebuilds the mirror automatically. Great news is that they are ow up to 2 TB's apiece, which means that in a 4 -bay enclosure you can store and mirror 4 TB's, plenty for many folks....

Then if you need a fast hard drive for scratch, you can get a solid-state drive, about $250 for a 128 Gig.

That's the way I see it.....

Lenny

[SKimber]

Lacie is great, probably the best according to my experience.
they have very solid team to work on drives and know drive very well.

[PenGun]

I like Western Digital but Seagate makes a good drive too. I would avoid anything else.

One thing that kills drives, and I bet a lot of portables die this way, is running them in several orientations. Run it flat or run it standing up but never change that drive's orientation.

[SKimber]

according to google's research, heat is not the death of drive, it's motor that caused the problem....

[patrickjames]

The only truth-if you want to make sure a drive is safe, buy two and put the same data on both. As far as external drives go, if there isn't a fan it will fail if you use it. There is your second truth.

[PenGun]

The only truth-if you want to make sure a drive is safe, buy two and put the same data on both. As far as external drives go, if there isn't a fan it will fail if you use it. There is your second truth.

No, the only truth about hard drives was voiced, I believe by a Seagate CTO, and he said:

"There are two kinds of hard drives, those that have failed and those that will fail."

[Sevo]

I have most emphatically not been impressed by Lacie drives.

Roll your own - these days, RAID storage servers are safe and cheap, and storage servers with embedded Linux can even be maintained for decades after the manufacturer has abandoned them (something which Lacie seemingly loves to do).

[Greg Miller]

The only truth-if you want to make sure a drive is safe, buy two and put the same data on both. As far as external drives go, if there isn't a fan it will fail if you use it. There is your second truth.

A better truth is to use 2 dissimilar drives. If you use 2 identical drives, and there is a design or manufacturing flaw, then the odds significantly increase that both will fail at about the same time.

[Frank Petronio]

I can confirm that LaCie drives fail quicker than other brands I've owned. Their case designs are pretty though. Although perhaps having Phillipe Starke design computer hardware led to some compromises with regards to cooling? And paying for a leading Eurotrash designer means they had to go cheaper on the components to hit their price point?

[BrianShaw]

I've had pretty good success with WD external drives, but I don't work them very hard nor do I need terabytes upon terabytes of storage space. I especially like the low cost and how that allow me to back up my back up for less than the price of a mroe expensive drive.

[IanMazursky]

I personally don’t recommend the Lacie drives, its not the hard drives themselves but the case and power supply that are the real problem.
I had a client that lost 3 of them within a year or 2 of buying them. The design is pretty but the heat they generate is definitely an issue.
Its worse with the BigDisk, they’re crammed together with little air circulation.
For some reason i bought a 1tb BigDisk to transfer files from a client, it was so hot after 20 minutes that i couldn’t touch it.
I bet i could have fried an egg on it or a least burn my finger prints off. Its now sitting in a closet unused.
I remember at one point that Lacie was offering drive restoration services for the BgDisk as part of the purchase price in the event of a malfunction.
I don’t know if they are still doing it but that tells you something about their faith in their own enclosures. I know a few people that had to use it within the first year.

Heat can kill a drive, not as fast as dropping or banging it but its not good for them or the components around them.
My 8 bay raid 5 array has over 10 fans just dedicated to the drives, they wouldn’t put them there if they didn’t need to be cooled.
Still the whole array is at 98-110F and the total combined fan speed is around 41k RPM (the little LCD told me).

WD drives are good but SeaGate drives are probably the best i have used. Ive never had a problem with them but they’re a bit more expensive then WD.
If youre going the raid route (best way!), buying drives from different manufacturing lots is a safer way to go. Especially with mirroring and stripping.
Ive been burned by a bad drive lot before and its not fun at all. I would also be careful with firewire and USB attached drives not that they’re bad.
If you don’t wait for them to fully detach from the OS after you eject the drive, you can damage the drives catalog tree or worse the data blocks.
When the catalog tree is damaged, usually it can be restored using software that can search for and rebuild the tree. Some data might be lost but youre not totally SOL.
Ive never had good luck with that route, the time alone for it to search the whole drive can be measured in days and its still a hit or miss.
Professional data recovery is very expensive and deep diving recovery for 1tb is a grand or more but worth every penny if you need it.

The only thing i can say to that is backup, backup and if youre in doubt backup again! You can never have to many good backups.
Also remember to test your restoration strategy often. Nothing worse then thinking you can restore your data only to find out that its corrupted or the drive is dead.

[Lenny Eiger]

Ian, I agree with just about everything you said.

<rant>I would add one thing that's a pet peeve of mine. I remember being at a macWorld Expo and buying a Granite Digital case, a "Bay-Cooler". When I got home I plugged it in and put my hand in front of the fan. It was rotating at around 5 RPM (I'm exaggerating for effect) and putting out hardly any air at all. I also had a conversation with FirmTek who made the first direct-connect (no cables) external SATA case way back when. Cooked a few drives in that case. I finally hooked up back to back external fans to that case.

Why can't any of these manufacturers put some decent fans in their cases? They all talk about their thermal designs, but as far as I can tell, they all stink. Fans aren't expensive, there are good quiet ones, just overpower the damn thing so you have plenty, what's the deal!!!?
</rant>

So Ian, I was going to get another Sonnet case. You like any specific one for cooling?

Lenny

[Greg Miller]

I would also be careful with firewire and USB attached drives not that they’re bad.
If you don’t wait for them to fully detach from the OS after you eject the drive, you can damage the drives catalog tree or worse the data blocks.
When the catalog tree is damaged, usually it can be restored using software that can search for and rebuild the tree. Some data might be lost but youre not totally SOL.
Ive never had good luck with that route, the time alone for it to search the whole drive can be measured in days and its still a hit or miss.
Professional data recovery is very expensive and deep diving recovery for 1tb is a grand or more but worth every penny if you need it.

With Mac's that is true. Originally it was the case with Windows too, but now it is safe to just unplug because Windows devices no longer hold data in the buffer more than a few seconds.

[jonathan_lipkin]

Peter Krogh has written an excellent book which covers digital workflow in quite a lot of detail. It's called the DAM Book, and there is a very good forum there as well.

The points he stresses are redundancy and consistency in workflow. Whatever you choose to do, and however you configure your drives think about how you backup and archive (two different terms) your data. I personally agree that RAID with some sort of mirroring (I use RAID 5 in an Otherworld Computing Q2 enclosure) is essential.

There is a site - http://www.storagereview.com/ - which has a user-contributed reliability databse as well as some good drive reviews.

[PenGun]

If you are going to build a RAID array then get real hard drives. The consumer ones are built to a very competitive price point.

For instance a Carviar Black 1 Terra, I use em', is about $90 these days. A 1 Terra RE3 is nearly $200. A much better drive.

[SKimber]

drive is drive... u need to back up your data anyway... doesnt matter its RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 1000... you need second backup or triple backups.... you will need it, trust me.

[PenGun]

drive is drive... u need to back up your data anyway... doesnt matter its RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 1000... you need second backup or triple backups.... you will need it, trust me.

I have negatives. Everything else is derivative and really does not matter much. My time mostly is at stake. So backups for me are really not needed at all.

I have some 70 Gig of cartoons, now they were collected over many years and are hard to replace. I keep them on two separate drives.

My games are all from Steam now so i can blow everything to ... hades and get em' back whenever I want.

Because of these facts I use cheap drives. If I had digital files I could not replace or if I was doing professional work I would use good drives. The enterprise level drives are much less likely to fail. No matter you scheme good drives are essential for important stuff.

[Ben Syverson]

My pile of old external drives (and cables, and power supplies) was really starting to pile up, so I bought a drive dock (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/) recently. Hopefully that will cut down on the clutter.

So far I've gotten lucky -- no big failures (knock on wood). I'm not very good about backing up recent photos. But every year, I copy my entire photo library over to a new drive and shelve the old one. So every photo from 2006 is now on at least 4 drives, including the current one.

Maybe what I need to do is buy another drive dock and mirror the drives. That way I'll have a live backup over the course of the year...

[IanMazursky]

Ian, I agree with just about everything you said.

<rant>I would add one thing that's a pet peeve of mine. I remember being at a macWorld Expo and buying a Granite Digital case, a "Bay-Cooler". When I got home I plugged it in and put my hand in front of the fan. It was rotating at around 5 RPM (I'm exaggerating for effect) and putting out hardly any air at all. I also had a conversation with FirmTek who made the first direct-connect (no cables) external SATA case way back when. Cooked a few drives in that case. I finally hooked up back to back external fans to that case.

Why can't any of these manufacturers put some decent fans in their cases? They all talk about their thermal designs, but as far as I can tell, they all stink. Fans aren't expensive, there are good quiet ones, just overpower the damn thing so you have plenty, what's the deal!!!?
</rant>
So Ian, I was going to get another Sonnet case. You like any specific one for cooling?
Lenny

Hi Lenny,

Thats the ultimate question “WHY?!!!”, why don’t they care about their client base enough to put in a fan.
Why do they make the enclosures so tight that they potentially compromise the longevity of the drives?
WHY? Economics, time or just plain stupidity. Either way, its sad and dangerous for us.

I like the enclosures from Promise (http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_all.aspx?region=en-global&m=15), OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/) and WiebeTech (http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php). WiebeTech (http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php) has some of the best designed enclosures ive come across. I would go with theirs over OWC.
The enclosures from Promise (http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_all.aspx?region=en-global&m=15) are expensive and for larger raid arrays (i have one here), but they’re worth every penny.
OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/) is a middle ground but they’re a good bang for the buck.

You also have the option of an additional hard drive fan that sits on top of the drive and plugs into the DC power.
I have a few that i bought years ago. They’re worth the $15-30 they cost.

-ian

[Deane Johnson]

To begin, I will never buy a LaCie product again as long as I live. Their primary issue is with their power bricks, but the idea of selling a 1-2 TB drive RAID as if it was a non-RAID drive is very out of integrity. Mine have all failed.

Lenny

+1

Mine have all failed also. I too will never buy another Lacie drive.

Deane

[jim kitchen]

Ditto on the LaCie crap...

Just in case you have not seen this before, this drive array might be fun to build, if a clean simple case could be found: http://gizmodo.com/5166798/24-solid-state-drives-open-all-of-microsoft-office-in-5-seconds

jim k

[m332720]

Just to be the Devils advocate here I have two Lacie drives that are at least 4 years old and have not had a bit of trouble with them.
And after this post I will probably go home and turn them on and find them to be toast..:-)

Michael

[Lenny Eiger]

Just to be the Devils advocate here I have two Lacie drives that are at least 4 years old and have not had a bit of trouble with them.
And after this post I will probably go home and turn them on and find them to be toast..:-)

Michael

Yea, well there are also people who smoke and live into their 90's... The truth is that the company they were buying their power supplies from did very poor work. They knew it, kept replacing things, kept updating, but never got there. They're not bad people, they just built a series of bad drives.

The worst are the "Big" drives where two drives are spanned to make one larger one. It's a very bad technique, essentially doubling the possibility of failure. I don't think the power supplies had enough juice to power them both.

So, it's great that they have lasted for you - and I am sure a percentage of others, but there are serious design flaws.

[jb7]

Another LaCie Big Disk failure, just the other day-
no warning, just gone-

Admittedly, it has lasted three years, and knowing how vulnerable it was, I had been using it as a scratch disk for ps only- and it was good at that-
I might even buy another couple of disks to get it going again-

I use two disks in a granite enclosure, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up one to the other, once a day (night).
Must get better at backing up to a third copy though- that one is not nearly up to date-

The point about using disks from different manufacturers seems a good one,
the next time I get a new pair of disks, I'll get two different ones...

[Frank Petronio]

Well I am going with cheap WD 2TB Firewire drives but several of them.... one stored at Grandmas, one unplugged, one online... Cycle and rotate, using Time Machine for casual backing up doubled with manual backups of final images, jobs, and archives. At $200 each they are hard to beat for ease and value, I can stash them all over the place.

Followed by occasional browsing through old files to see how they are looking.

Next year I'll buy 4TB drives for the same price ;-)

The other thing I am doing is sticking about a gig of high-quality jpgs of my prime portfolio onto my web service. That's all I really need in the end if everything got fried.

Oh and shooting more film ;-)

[Allen in Montreal]

........

To begin, I will never buy a LaCie product again as long as I live.

Lenny

I recently bought 2 more 1T LaCie units and set them up to mirror copy.
This batch feels different, everything is cheaper.
The cables feel like cheap sh$$, the power plug is some one does all cheapie thing, and the drives are noisy compared to all the other LaCie I have.
I have a bunch of old Lacie that date back to when 80 gig drives were the big boys in town, they are solid like a rock and still work perfectly.
This last batch makes me nervous as i listen to them clunk away.

[Mike Anderson]

Sh!!!t! All my important data is on a LaCie (and my backup drive is a LaCie). Now you guys have me worried, so I'm considering a NewerTech Guardian MAXimus (RAID 1) from OWC for my iMac (FW800):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/GM8Q7S15TB64/

Anyone have any experience with these things? Some versions have Seagate Barracuda drives and some have Hitachi Deskstar drives. Any comments?

...Mike

[Lenny Eiger]

Sh!!!t! All my important data is on a LaCie (and my backup drive is a LaCie). Now you guys have me worried, so I'm considering a NewerTech Guardian MAXimus (RAID 1) from OWC for my iMac (FW800):...Mike

One of the things I always tell people is that if you buy a case, and buy some drives, you can save thousands. Well, prices are coming down... but considerable savings, altho' not as much, are still to be had.

The easiest thing in the world is to put an internal drive into a case. There are some enclosures that doesn't even have screws... That said, I would very much prefer ESata vs Firewire 800. Sata drives are really quick. You will throttle it down considerably with FW. If its just backup, no matter, but an ESata will feel just like your internal drive...

A 4-5 Bay enclosure can be from 200-600, drives are 100-175 for 2 Terabyte drives. SoftRAID, which I like, is $129. You can stripe, mirror, span, etc. Solid and very easy interface. If your computer doesn't have ESata out, there are numerous inexpensive cards you can stick in the PCIE slot. PC's can't use SoftRAID, but there are equivalent products over there as well.

It's too easy....


Lenny

[SW Rick]

Sh!!!t! All my important data is on a LaCie (and my backup drive is a LaCie). Now you guys have me worried, so I'm considering a NewerTech Guardian MAXimus (RAID 1) from OWC for my iMac (FW800):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/GM8Q7S15TB64/

Anyone have any experience with these things? Some versions have Seagate Barracuda drives and some have Hitachi Deskstar drives. Any comments?

...Mike

I've got the 2TB (2x2) maximus with eSata from OWC- no problems or issues. I think they are Hitachis, as I recall. Have always found OWC reliable and they stand behind their product. If I needed more capacity, I'd look at something like what Lenny suggests.

Rick

[Mike Anderson]

One of the things I always tell people is that if you buy a case, and buy some drives, you can save thousands. Well, prices are coming down... but considerable savings, altho' not as much, are still to be had.

The easiest thing in the world is to put an internal drive into a case. There are some enclosures that doesn't even have screws... That said, I would very much prefer ESata vs Firewire 800. Sata drives are really quick. You will throttle it down considerably with FW. If its just backup, no matter, but an ESata will feel just like your internal drive...

A 4-5 Bay enclosure can be from 200-600, drives are 100-175 for 2 Terabyte drives. SoftRAID, which I like, is $129. You can stripe, mirror, span, etc. Solid and very easy interface. If your computer doesn't have ESata out, there are numerous inexpensive cards you can stick in the PCIE slot. PC's can't use SoftRAID, but there are equivalent products over there as well.

It's too easy....

Lenny

I appreciate your advice. But I have an iMac so FW800 is my fastest plug (no esata, no PCIE). 2 terabytes of RAID 1 should do me (this is my home computer, not a business).

So it's $400 for a 2T (+2T) RAID 1 device that I can just plug in. If I can do better than that by tinkering around (better cheaper or better more rugged) I'm interested. It would be good experience. I'm not much of a computer hardware guy, but I can read instructions, use a screwdriver and plug cables in. If you have any advice along those lines (or a pointer to a web page "RAID building for dummies") I'd like to hear.

Thanks,
...Mike

[Mike Anderson]

I've got the 2TB (2x2) maximus with eSata from OWC- no problems or issues. I think they are Hitachis, as I recall. Have always found OWC reliable and they stand behind their product. If I needed more capacity, I'd look at something like what Lenny suggests.

Rick

Thanks for telling me that. I've posted similar questions on mac-forums.com and on another photography forum and got no response, so it's good to get some feedback about OWC/MAXimus.

All this talk about building your own has got me interested, but that MAXimus 2T+2T for $400 is a good benchmark, something to shoot for if I build my own or something to fall back on if I don't.

Thanks for your response,
...Mike

[Frank Petronio]

Mike I almost got that same OWC 2Tb-2Tb Maximus as well but in the end decided to use three separate cheap 2Tb drives and physically cycle them.

In addition to drive failure, my other concerns are a direct lightening strike taking out everything I've got plugged in.... And a house fire. In either case the best RAID multi-stack melts just as readily as a $200 WD box.

Nothing beats just making the time to do the back-ups and physically removing one of the drives from the location. Kind of like the president, vice-president, and speaker of the house during war time -- never have all three in a vulnerable spot.

(But maybe we could send the current speaker off to Afghanistan?... bite my tongue.)

[Mike Anderson]

Mike I almost got that same OWC 2Tb-2Tb Maximus as well but in the end decided to use three separate cheap 2Tb drives and physically cycle them.

In addition to drive failure, my other concerns are a direct lightening strike taking out everything I've got plugged in.... And a house fire. In either case the best RAID multi-stack melts just as readily as a $200 WD box.

Nothing beats just making the time to do the back-ups and physically removing one of the drives from the location. Kind of like the president, vice-president, and speaker of the house during war time -- never have all three in a vulnerable spot.

All good points. Just when I was thinking about what kind of decals I was going to put on my homemade RAID system...

What WD units are you getting?



(But maybe we could send the current speaker off to Afghanistan?... bite my tongue.)
POLITICS! Infraction point! OMG politics in the digital hardware forum of all places. Jeez Frank you really like to push the boundaries, don't you?
:)

...Mike

[Lenny Eiger]

I appreciate your advice. But I have an iMac so FW800 is my fastest plug (no esata, no PCIE). 2 terabytes of RAID 1 should do me (this is my home computer, not a business).

So it's $400 for a 2T (+2T) RAID 1 device that I can just plug in. If I can do better than that by tinkering around (better cheaper or better more rugged) I'm interested. It would be good experience. I'm not much of a computer hardware guy, but I can read instructions, use a screwdriver and plug cables in. If you have any advice along those lines (or a pointer to a web page "RAID building for dummies") I'd like to hear.

Thanks,
...Mike

I think the FW is fine. I would rather use SoftRAID than a supplied RAID setup, personally. SoftRAID is very reliable. Makes it a little more... but I guess I'm skittish from my LaCie experience(s) of late. I'd like to be able to see my drives, format them with my own software, and pull one of the mirrored drives out every once in a while and put it away somewhere.

Costs. SoftRAID 129. Case for two drives. Icy Dock 2 Bay $119 (for example). 2 - 2TB Drives: 110-175. Worst case (best drives) $350. $468 for cheaper drives. $598 for the expensive ones. Peace of mind - priceless. ;-)

RAID building for dummies is too simple for a book. You screw the drives into whatever sliding tray they supply and slide them in. Plug it in. The drives show up. Use either SoftRAID, or a program like it, to format the drives into partitions, mirrors, whatever.

RAID 0 is striping - writing blocks to one drive while the other is reading, etc. (Read, Write verify steps). Cuts a file up into however many pieces you have specified. This is very fast. It's also very dangerous, if one drive goes down, you lose everything. It has to be backed up properly. However, drive speeds have improved so much that it really isn't necessary anymore (IMO).

Raid 1 is mirroring. The same data is written to two drives at the same time. Very tiny speed hit.

Raid 5 is striping, but writing a second partition containing data that can be used to recover things if a drive ini the set goes down.

Raid 1+0 Striping and mirroring at the same time. Great, but uses a lot of drives, needs a hardware controller, I believe.

There's also spanning, which combines two drives to make large one. Same problems as striping, if one goes down, etc.

Just got a new Mac Pro - and this time I'm going with mirroring, and if I need a super-fast scratch I'll add a SSD drive.

Hope this is helpful.

Lenny

[Nathan Potter]

I'm somewhat new to all this stuff so this thread is very informative. I'm just setting up two separate backup drives that will be alternately connected to and disconnected from two computers. A WD and a Seagate of 1 TB capacity. I'm horrified at how slow the backup is. I get about 2 GB per hr. with the WD. At this rate it will take 500 hrs. to fill er up! Is this normal and how can I increase the write speed, say by a factor of ten. Conversely it takes about 15 min. to download a single scanned 500MB 4X5 photoshop processed image! Hell of a situation! Don't know how I will manage with my 8X10 chromes.

God bless wet processing and printing.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Lenny Eiger]

A WD and a Seagate of 1 TB capacity. I'm horrified at how slow the backup is. I get about 2 GB per hr. with the WD. At this rate it will take 500 hrs. to fill er up! Is this normal and how can I increase the write speed, say by a factor of ten.

Sounds like something is very wrong....

Did you try and copy the whole set of folders at once? What interface are you plugged into? These aren't the drives you get from Costco are they? (If so return them.)

Lenny

[Nathan Potter]

50 GB of images all at once or one image at a time - same down load or upload time. Serial 2.0 hard wire, Mac G4 with 1.5 GB RAM, CPU 1 GHz. Well, not the greatest but I'm working on it. Drives from Frys' Electronics.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[f1point0]

-1 for OWC. I will NEVER EVER buy another item from them again.

I bought two 1TB mercury elite drives from them 2 years ago and have had nothing but problems. The power adapters failed on both of the drives and good luck getting quick service as OWC customer service has absolutely no common sense or a sense of urgency.

I had to jump through so many hoops and they made me send the entire drive in even though I knew it was the power supply. I had two identical drives so when the first one went, I was able to test with the power supply from the working drive and confirmed that the power supply was indeed the issue.

I must have gone back and forth with over 10 emails and 10+ calls trying to explain that all I needed was a new power supply and that I needed things to be expedited since one drive was the backup and I was flying solo which was SCARY. No such luck. All I got was frustration and a complete lack of the ability to process basic logic on the part of their customer service reps. The kicker was that when I sent the drive in, the invoice came back as having replaced some logic board, even though I clearly told them that the power supply was the problem. #$!?@! Strike one with the return. Well, they did the same thing again, by replacing the logic board when I sent the drive in the second time. Strike two. Finally, on the 3rd try they replaced the power supply and things were up and running again...

Until 2 weeks later when the other drive died as a result of another failed power supply. The second time dealing with the return and customer service was even more painful than the first time if you can believe that. Got the same run around but on top of that they kept confusing the first return with this second return. The rep kept insisting that I had already gotten a replacement power supply and no matter how much I tried to explain things as simply and basic as possible, she couldn't understand that what I needed was a replacement power supply for the second drive which had nothing to do with the first situation. It was like talking to one of those people that you see on PBS documentaries who have had frontal lobe damage and no longer have any short term memory ability. I still haven't gotten the second replacement power supply since at that point I was done with OWC.

Utterly frustrated with OWC, I ordered a 2TB G-drive and a 2TB G-Safe about 2 months ago. I'm not going to say how things have been to jinx myself, but let's just say my blood pressure is lower and I haven't had to send numerous emails or talk for hours on the phone trying to get a stupid company to send me a replacement $5 made in China piece of crap power supply.

Steer clear of OWC if you value your time and health.

[PenGun]

I'm somewhat new to all this stuff so this thread is very informative. I'm just setting up two separate backup drives that will be alternately connected to and disconnected from two computers. A WD and a Seagate of 1 TB capacity. I'm horrified at how slow the backup is. I get about 2 GB per hr. with the WD. At this rate it will take 500 hrs. to fill er up! Is this normal and how can I increase the write speed, say by a factor of ten. Conversely it takes about 15 min. to download a single scanned 500MB 4X5 photoshop processed image! Hell of a situation! Don't know how I will manage with my 8X10 chromes.

God bless wet processing and printing.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

Is that a USB setup? I dunno does a G4 run USB 2 or perhaps USB 1.2? That would explain your slow speeds.

[Ben Syverson]

Serial 2.0 hard wire, Mac G4 with 1.5 GB RAM, CPU 1 GHz. Well, not the greatest but I'm working on it. Drives from Frys' Electronics.
I'm all for utilizing hardware for as long as possible (people all too often upgrade unnecessarily), but I would not want to be dealing with 8x10 scans on a computer made before the turn of the century!

If you can scrape together $500, you can buy a refurbished 2.26 GHZ Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM, 160GB HD, DVD burner and a decent video card, straight from the Apple Store... (http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC238LL/A?mco=MTU5MTc1MzI)

[Mike Anderson]

I think the FW is fine. I would rather use SoftRAID than a supplied RAID setup, personally. SoftRAID is very reliable. Makes it a little more... but I guess I'm skittish from my LaCie experience(s) of late. I'd like to be able to see my drives, format them with my own software, and pull one of the mirrored drives out every once in a while and put it away somewhere.

Costs. SoftRAID 129. Case for two drives. Icy Dock 2 Bay $119 (for example). 2 - 2TB Drives: 110-175. Worst case (best drives) $350. $468 for cheaper drives. $598 for the expensive ones. Peace of mind - priceless. ;-)
....

Definitely something to thing about. Although I can't find an Icy Dock 2 bay for less than $180. Newer Technology offers 2 bay case for $129 (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/GM8QKIT0GB/).

Any specific recommendations for drives?

Thanks,
...Mike

[Lenny Eiger]

Definitely something to thing about. Although I can't find an Icy Dock 2 bay for less than $180. Newer Technology offers 2 bay case for $129 (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/GM8QKIT0GB/).

Any specific recommendations for drives?

Thanks,
...Mike

Mike,

I used pricegrabber, found one for 109. I'm not familiar with these myself, that cld be last year's model, for all I know. I was just using it as a comparison...

It's my personal opinion that the best drives are Seagate. I've cooked every brand, but the Seagate's seem to hold up best - at least in my shop. The more expensive ones are probably a better bet. They're about $175 for a 2TB.

This is a little bit of a religious issue. I have 5 Hitachi's in a 5TB RAID that have been going for a about 3 years without a beep. I also have some Western Digital 10,000 RPM 250's that make a fast scratch drive in another. They are all working well.

I think you can get a good drive from any of the main manufacturers. (And a bad one). It's well-defined, basically old, technology at this point. We all get religious when we lose a drive, and swear never to buy that brand again.

My 2 cents....

Lenny

[Greg Miller]

This is 3 years old now but Google did their own study of hard drive failure, and is the only study to date of enough size and substance to have real value from a statistical perspective.

If you are up for reading the full document, you can find it here (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf). I'll let you form your own conclusions.

If you want a quick summary, you can read this post (http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/) by Engadget.

[paulr]

Old thread but I wanted to share this discovery. No experience but it's such a cool idea that plan to use it to migrate all my external backups:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock

The idea is that you buy a single dock, and then for media you use bare hard drive mechanisms (which typically cost half or less the price of an external drive). You can use it to repurpose retired internal drives, and this way have multiple off-site backups for very little investment. Base price of the firewire 800 model is $70.