Best External hard drive

[mrdavek]

My Glyph /project X crapped out on me

What is the best external hard drive for a MAC G4 running Pro tools LE 8?

Thanks for your suggestions

Dave

[LSchefman]

I have to observe that all the expensive Glyph drives I bought in the past died at about the same time as ordinary drives. That's because they WERE ordinary drives manufactured by the usual drive makers, with fancier cases.

There are only 4 full size hard drive manufacturers left in the world: Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi and Samsung.

Seagate and Samsung have good reputations, but this is obviously not scientific. Google supposedly did a study of reliability, but they didn't publish the results, except to say that operating drives at temperatures below about 80 degrees actually failed twice as often as those operating at up to 120 degrees or so(!), which flies in the face of the usual "cooler is better" assumption. The problem is that there haven't been published studies of drive reliability between these manufacturers!

Anyway, companies like Glyph are merely putting the drives they buy from suppliers in cases, and offering various external features. La Cie is supposed to have good drives - I've used them for several years with no failures, and have heard similar comments by quite a few other Mac-based studio rats, but that means nothing scientifically. People seem to like G Drives as well.

The problem is that the usual drive self-ratings (i.e., MTBF) are relatively meaningless. The smartest thing to do, of course, is to back up all your data regularly and hope for the best!

[elambo]

Good info, Les. Too bad the public isn't allowed a closer peak at the raw data from that survey.

Dave - What often fails in an external HDD is the power supply and that CAN be pinned on the manufacturer who assembles them. This can be fixed rather easily, and in an emergency you can take the drive out of the case and put it in another, or in your computer itself. We've done this at my studio many times. I'm not recommending this, just pointing out that it's possible in an emergency.

Have you contacted Glyph? I've had Glyph drives that wouldn't mount in the past - one, maybe two - and Glyph sent out a replacement immediately after the call, BEFORE receiving my bad drive. It's one of the reasons I stick with them for important data. That and the fact that they have the highest reliability in my experience. But EVERY manufacturer's drives fail. Lacie is by far the worst in my experience, and by a long shot. Each and every drive I've bought from Lacie has failed. But Les has had better experiences with them. This shows that there are no gold standards when it comes to firewire drives.

The other two companies I buy from are OWC and Wiebetech, both of which have very low rates of failure (as in "no" failures) and I've been using them for about 8 years and 4 years respectively.

You're running PT8, which means you're using Leopard, which means you have access to TimeMachine. I suggest buying a drive specifically for TimeMachine backups, and be sure to use it! If you don't like the idea of the computer running backups every hour, get one of the apps which allow custom scheduling. I set my computers to backup each night at 5am when I'm certainly not going to be using it.

[MichaelK]

Glyph made sense when SCSI was the thing to use, being a more finicky technology. The Glyph UW SCSI unit I bought 10 years ago is still going strong; it's my main drive for recording and mixing. It needed the power supply replaced about 7 years ago, that was all.

I've had LaCie FW drives and they worked fine for a while but all of them crapped out, life expectancy about 2.5 years. I've been using only OWC drives for the last 4 years or so and they've been holding up beautifully.

[MichaelK]

Google supposedly did a study of reliability, but they didn't publish the results... The problem is that there haven't been published studies of drive reliability between these manufacturers!

Kind of like the USDA food pyramid?