Best deal on a 2TB Firewire External HD?

[Frank Petronio]

I've always bought nicer LaCie drives at Mac-like prices, but if I went over to the darkside and wanted just a tin box and a simple brute force mass storage device, what is the best bang for my buck?

I think I need to buy two 2TB HDs to get through next year...

Thanks

[Michael T. Murphy]

I have been stacking up 200GB drives, instead of using one larger drive. I buy them for $40 each when on sale, 10 at a time.

Just seems like too much risk with the large drives. There are some decent hot-swapable enclosures for multiple drives. Stack 5 200GB for a terabyte, about $450 or so. None off the top of my head right now, haven't looked for a year.

Best,
Michael

[Frank Petronio]

$400 for all that power draw and heat and noise... idk, I can find LaCie 2TB for $715. I am thinking more along the lines of having two big drives and using some of the old 500gb ones for off site critical back up.

[Ed Richards]

Is this backup or primary storage? If it is primary, and you are in the terabyte range, it is time to start thinking about a good RAID stack.

[Jeremy Moore]

Don't know how these are in terms of quality, but this is what's I've been looking at buying today:

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...ct_code=338299

Only 1TB, though, as I've found it cheaper to pick up 2x 1TB than 1x 2TB.

[Jeremy Moore]

another option is to get 2 external drives and just have one clone the other using a program such as SuperDuper! instead of doing internal RAID.

[Ted Harris]

You can buy cases and naked drives from www.datamem.com (Data Memory Systems) for usually the lowest $$$ around. They are the "Midwest Photo" of the RAM and memory world. I have been buying memory and drives from them for 20 years and have always had terrific service and prices. I usually deal with Bud. An example, just paid them $338 for 4 GB of RAM for my new Mac Pro and got a 200 GB 2.5 external SATA drive and nice metal enclosure for ~ $120.

You can find cheaper drives but they will usually be in sealed plastic cases and you run the risk of damaging the drive if you need to chisel the case ope to get to the drive.Even then these cheap drives are not much cheaper.

[Michael Graves]

You might consider a NAS solution if you don't need super-high data transfer rates. Something like the Thermaltake N0001N will accomodate up to 4 1TB drives and connect via Ethernet. However, even with gigabit Ethernet, you won't get the transfer rates you get form local storage. The basic unit, without hard disks, will set you back in the vicinity of $450.00. Then pick your poison for drives.

[Daniel Geiger]

You might consider a NAS solution if you don't need super-high data transfer rates. Something like the Thermaltake N0001N will accomodate up to 4 1TB drives and connect via Ethernet. However, even with gigabit Ethernet, you won't get the transfer rates you get form local storage. The basic unit, without hard disks, will set you back in the vicinity of $450.00. Then pick your poison for drives.

Seems like the Thermalake is is RAID 0 and 1, but not RAID 5 like the Buffalo technologies terrastation. I have a 1TB terrastation in RAID 5 and am happy with it; currently the best value/$ is 2TB with them, but still a good grand. RAID 5 gives you more effective storage at full drive failure protection, so for me the preferred way to go.

[QT Luong]

I definitively wouldn't use the LaCie big drives as primary, as they are RAID 0.

At the moment, the most secure, least expensive, and fastest storage method is to have a set of separate eSATA 500GB drives mirrored.