Please recommend a good hard drive.

[straticus]

I'm running a PC with a 60 GB HD for my apps and a 40 GB hard drive for my wave files. Needless to say, the 40 GB tends to get full fast. I'd like to up-grade to a larger HD, say around 100 GB. The super larges ones make me nervous for some reason.

So, what are some brands that you can recommend and what are some good places to buy them?

Thanks, BC :)

[MichaelK]

I use LaCie firewire drives, which are also USB compatible. I've taken them on the road many times and have found them to be fast, sturdy, quiet and dependable. The oldest one is about 2.5 years old and has logged I don't know how many hundreds of hours of digital audio throughput.

There may be other brands that are as good, but I recommend LaCie because I know it. I had a less expensive Maxtor drive that became a doorstop in about 13 months – just out of warranty.

[Norcal_GIT_r]

Originally posted by MichaelK
I use LaCie firewire drives,

So do I, They've worked well for me so far.

[straticus]

Thanks for the suggestion but I'd have to get a fire wire card right? I'm plum out of slots! Plus, aren't the external hard drives kind of pricy? I like the concept though and might go that way some day.

I'm realy looking for an internal hard drive to replace one of the two that are already there.

BC :)

[elambo]

Avoid the Porsche drives. Just had one bite the dust the other day after less than a year's service. It never felt solid, even from the beginning.

LaCie-branded drives has been good to me for the most part, although one particular firewire 350gig is starting to get tempermental and will need to be replaced soon.

I've had mixed results with Maxtor. In general they're very sturdy. I don't think I've ever had an internal Maxtor drive go bad, and I've been using them for over a decade. I did have one external Maxtor choke on me but it was in a cheap firewire case - my bad - and the powersupply failed as it was writing a catalog file, which caused the whole drive to be unreadable.

The best overall is Glyph, but you'll pay for it. Their service is incredible. If your drive fails, they'll ship a replacement drive the day you call, FedEx next day service.

I used to buy online, but now that they're charging tax, along with shipping, it's no longer a bargain. I buy locally.

[elambo]

I also missed the fact that you're looking for an internal drive.

Go with Maxtor. I was a fan of Seagate last year but unsure how they hold up these days.

[dkaplowitz]

The quality of hard drives in general has gone down somewhat in the last 2-3 years. They are all prone to failure. I used to swear by Maxtor and avoid Western Digital at all costs, but now I don't really mind. Their warranties are all the same, and I provide my own redundancy and/or backup (which is an absolute must if you can't afford to lose any data). That having been said, I wouldn't be afraid of the larger drives, unless the price bugs you...and even so, the price differential between a 100GB and a 250GB drive won't be that much ($40. maybe?)

Look for 7200RPM with 8MB cache as a minimum for reasonable speed and pick the size (in GB) you want. Newegg.com's real professional to deal with, but sometimes you get good deals at a local Staples or Office Despot.

I've not dealt with Lacie. The only thing stopping me though is that their stuff seems pretty expensive. I'd just assume buy two 320GB Maxtors or WDs and mirror them than buy one overpriced 160GB external drive. Just my taste though.

Good luck.

Dave

[MichaelK]

Originally posted by dkaplowitz
I've not dealt with Lacie. The only thing stopping me though is that their stuff seems pretty expensive.
I thought so too, 'til my Maxtor turned to shit so quickly. Now I'd gladly pay the additional $50 - 75 difference to have it last another two years... and still going strong (thank G-d). I wouldn't f*ck around with other brands, what's the point? We're not talking about hundreds of dollars difference.

But everyone has their own budget to deal with, so I understand.

I believe LaCie uses Seagate drives. Speaking of overpriced (and then some), Glyph uses Seagate.

[elambo]

Originally posted by MichaelK
Now I'd gladly pay the additional $50 - 75 difference to have it last another two years...

...Speaking of overpriced (and then some), Glyph uses Seagate...

That's contradictory. You'd gladly pay more for a drive that will last, but somehow Glyph is "overpriced?" Did you have a bad experience with Glyph?

[Norcal_GIT_r]

Originally posted by elambo
That's contradictory. You'd gladly pay more for a drive that will last, but somehow Glyph is "overpriced?" Did you have a bad experience with Glyph?
Glyph is way over priced.
I once bought an External Glyph CD Burner.
It cost me 499.99..This was sometime ago. I opened up the case to find a 149.99 panasonic burner. I guess thier cases and cool graphics are worth the extra $350.00.

Basicaly all Glyph does is put a good drive in a good case and charge atleast twice if not 4xs what it would cost the user to get a nice drive and case and spend 15 minutes to assemble it.

I recently bought a LaCie 160 gig FW drive for my studio. It cost $129.99 at Frys. The Glyph 160 runs $249.99 at Sweetwater.
Do you really think that a Glyph case is worth an extra $120.00?

[dkaplowitz]

I've not heard enough about Lacie drives to convince me they'll last longer than just about any other commercial/consumer-grade hard drive on the market. Hell, we have tons of top dollar SCSI drives go dead at work all the time on our NAS, SAN, in Sun servers and Dell/Intel servers. Nothing's guaranteed is my point, and if you care about data loss, you'll settle for nothing less than a RAID configuration with a good backup system. But that's money (though how much really compared to the loss of weeks of work?).

[Norcal_GIT_r]

Originally posted by dkaplowitz
I've not heard enough about Lacie drives to convince me they'll last longer than just about any other commercial/consumer-grade hard drive on the market. Hell, we have tons of top dollar SCSI drives go dead at work all the time on our NAS, SAN, in Sun servers and Dell/Intel servers. Nothing's guaranteed is my point, and if you care about data loss, you'll settle for nothing less than a RAID configuration with a good backup system. But that's money (though how much really compared to the loss of weeks of work?).

Raid is cool if I need to backup a whole network, but its way way overkill for me to backup the music I create in my studio.
All do is copy to my FW drive and also burn a DVD.
Also Raid is not supported by Pro Tools so I couldnt record to it if I had too. I can record to FW if it has an Oxford 911 chip, which the Lacie drives have.

[bbarnard]

I've not used them for music but I've had nothing but good experience with Maxtor. Don't know if other brands have started providing the software or not but Maxtor shipped their drives with software that would allow you to image one drive from the old one. This was particularly useful when going from a smaller drive to a larger when you also wanted to be able to boot from it. You just had to have both drives in the same machine, one as master and one as slave. Then take the old one out and put the new one in as the master. Was a HUGE time savings rather than having to reinstall everything.

[LSchefman]

>>Did you have a bad experience with Glyph?<<

I still have several rackmount Glyph drives, and one standalone CD-ROM drive, all bought years ago.

All of the fans crapped out and started making noises fairly early on, and I stopped using the drives. This would be an easy fix, but on the rackmount drives, due to a manufacturing error in the material they clearcoated the drives with, it is extremely difficult to crack the case. You have to break the seal with a hammer (I was told this by Glyph).

I was never offered a fedex swap. Maybe they will do this with in-warranty items, but it ain't eternal. The service people are indeed very helpful, but I did have several emails ignored.

They are not servicing out-of-warranty items, even if you offer to pay for it.

I paid over a grand for each rackmount drive back in the day.

I would not call this a bad experience...stuff happens. But I would say that I perceived no added value in buying from Glyph, and as a result, I would agree that they are pricing themselves way too high.

Incidentally, if anyone needs a Glyph rackmount combination 2GB Jaz and CD-ROM SCSI drive set for their sampler, that makes a lot of grinding noise until the fan warms up, you may have mine for free if you pay shipping. Get your hammer ready!

By way of contrast, I also had a couple of rackmount Dynatek units (I don't even know if they're still in business), and they worked for years and years without a single problem. I'm talking a decade or more. The rackmount cases were also far nicer and sturdier.

I still have my 2GB DAT backup drive Dynatek made, and even after 13 years (!) it still works perfectly. Then again, since technology marches on, the only use I have for it is if someone needs me to get at one of my older pieces' data. So far, no one has.

[MichaelK]

Originally posted by elambo
That's contradictory. You'd gladly pay more for a drive that will last, but somehow Glyph is "overpriced?" Did you have a bad experience with Glyph?
Oh, come on. There's nothing "contradictory" in that statement.

The cheapest drives one cab buy are about $50 less than LaCie. Glyph costs about double what LaCie costs.

Glyph has decent customer "service," if speed of turnaround is all that matters to you... but when I had problems with the power supply in my SCSI drive housing it took two trips to their service dept. to fix it - and *I* had to pay the freight... while it was under warranty.

So that whole FedEx thing is a bunch of BS – they'll send it via topless call girl, as long as I'm paying for it.

(EDIT correction: As I now recall (it was years ago), I raised holy hell about the shipping charges when I had to send it back a second time. Since they hadn't fixed it correctly the first time, they reluctantly agreed to pay the FedEx charges.)

Glyph doesn't make the drives. They design and configure housings for Seagate drives. When SCSI was the thing their drives held up longer than most with heavy use, and maybe they were worth the extra money at that time. But with firewire so much more hassle-free than SCSI, there's absolutely no reason to pay that kind of upcharge. Digital audio and video is no longer big news to drive manufacturers. What Glyph does with firewire is nothing special.

On the other hand, cheap drives are still cheap drives.

[elambo]

I've used Glyph's overnight drive exchange twice, and in each case their drives failed due to human error on the part of my company. That's impeccable service.

I'll restate that Glyph drives have never failed for me - the ONLY company that can make such a claim. I've used their DDS tape drives, hard drives, and CD drives. A perfect track record for about 10 years. If they charge more than you're comfortable paying, there are plenty others to choose from that will still last a while before eventually loosing your data.

[elambo]

Just a quick check of Sweetwater's prices for a Glyph Firewire/USB 2.0 drive - 200gigs for $270. And that's Sweetwater so there's no discount. Quite reasonable, actually.

[MichaelK]

>> A perfect track record for about 10 years.

Right... for you. I've had a Glyph SCSI drive stop dead in its tracks, never to start again, and the data was recoverable only from backup.

On the other hand, the LaCie firewire drives have not failed yet... but so what if they eventually do? Drives fail. It's something they do. That's why we back up data.

[LSchefman]

I'm sure everyone's had good and bad luck with various drives.

Bad luck doesn't mean the company is bad. It means that I experienced a high percentage of problems, and that at some point I have concluded they were using faulty components. Since years have passed, it is likely that they have corrected this problem.

But are they worth the extra money? 200 gigs for $270 doesn't compare favorably with, say, a G-Drive, which is a top-testing drive with an extremely well-designed fanless case with heat sink, where you get 250 gigs for around $200. The G-drives are showing up in lots of studios I deal with.

On the other hand, Glyph offers some drives with features that no one else offers. So if I needed a drive rack with multiple drives that I could slide in and out of their rack front panel, I'd consider Glyph despite my less than good experiences.

I try to be even-handed about this sort of thing, though it's hard when one's personal experience was a disappointment.

[MichaelK]

Originally posted by LSchefman
So if I needed a drive rack with multiple drives that I could slide in and out of their rack front panel, I'd consider Glyph despite my less than good experiences.
FWIW I still use the Glyph SCSI custom rackmount housing I bought in '99 with two of their hot-swap drives, and they work great. One I've had since '00 and the other since '03. In my studio those are my primary audio drives.

I use firewire drives in the studio only for backing up the SCSI drives. Because I've seen how quickly a good drive can go bad.

[straticus]

Thanks for all of the replies and conversation. Very informative.

I'm going to look at the LaCie and G drives.:AOK

[straticus]

OK, a couple more questions.

I can't find any info on the G Drives. Any one got a link?

Also, LaCie drives all seem to be external. I'm looking for an internal drive. How do Seagate drives rate?

Thanks again for the help. :)

[LSchefman]

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE-mini.cfm

[GerryJ]

http://www.tapeop.com/magazine/bonus.php

What’s wrong with digitally archiving audio?
Analog tape has proven to be playable after 50 years. There are thousands of tape recorders in the
world that will still be usable for many years to come. I have DAT tapes now from the ’80s that
won't play. People using computer software that changes every six months are in for a rude
awakening ten years from now when they want to do a re-mix, forget about it. All these FireWire
drives that are so popular if stored for long periods of time won't even spin up, assuming you still
have the software to talk to them, it's a real problem. I just transferred Joe Satriani's last three albums
done on Pro Tools to analog 2" tape. We realized when we were working on his Anthology CD for
Epic that we were using tapes from 1986. Twenty years from now I don't expect anyone will be able
to play a Pro Tools 6.2 file from Joe's FireWire drives.

[elambo]

Actually Gerry, the audio itself (SDII, AIFF, WAV, whatever) from Joe's ProTools sessions will be playable for the rest of the foreseeable future. Even if these formats go out of fashion, they'll always be accessible (unless the Amish take over). Tape deteriorates eventually (just ask Criterion who reconstructs old film stock), but drives can easily be copied. In fact, there's an archive-quality DVD media that will last for a century if hard drives make you nervous.

I've had uncountable problems with digital audio tape backup.

[straticus]

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE-mini.cfm

Thanks much for the link, Mr. Schefman.:AOK

It looks like the G Drives are all external. They use Hitachi drives and put them in their G Drive cases. Which is what Glyph does with Seagate drives and that's why I was wondering what sort of rap Seagate drives get? I found this at Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148065 and I'm ready to buy. So, what do you guys think?

[elambo]

I found this at Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148065 and I'm ready to buy. So, what do you guys think?

I'd say go for it straticus. I put two Seagates similar to that one in a computer I built for storing and playing DVDs. They've been good drives, and quiet if that's necessary.

[Scott Peterson]

I've had good luck with Maxtor, WD and Seagate.

I use them all as internal drive and archive data once a week at least. You can grab 300Gig drives for just over $100 now with rebates. It is a no-brainer IMHO.

[straticus]

OK, I'm going for the Seagate.

Thanks for the help and guidance guys. I really appreciate it! :)