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/200...r-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/200...r-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).