G-Drives versus Western Digital-LaCie-etc.

[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 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, OWC and WiebeTech. WiebeTech has some of the best designed enclosures ive come across. I would go with theirs over OWC.
The enclosures from Promise are expensive and for larger raid arrays (i have one here), but they’re worth every penny.
OWC 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-...e-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.../GM8Q7S15TB64/

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

...Mike