External HD Recoms Sought

[Dierk]

After my fourth Maxtor One Touch III [500 GB, FW-connected], the third replacement, finally gave up on me for bad, and the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 1 TBs aren't shipping [in Germany], I'd be happy for recommendations and experience reports on external HDs. I don't much care for speed, reliability is a much higher good.

I am especially interested in said Seagates - which seem to use an aluminium case, a big plus over the OT III design -, and Maxtor One Touch IV. Since my first external, Maxtor One Touch II 250 Gig, performs very well for years, I am not giving up hope in the brand. Western Digital's MyBook expereinces are also welcome. The only drives completely out are eSATA-exclusives; while I like to connect via Firewire, USB 2.0 is also in. Sizes of 500 and 1000 Gig as long as it is one drive, no RAID set-ups.

[dandill]

Last weekend my home system failed to boot, due to a corrupted configuration file. I needed to rebuild from bare metal. When the dust settled, I was surprised to see that my 150 GB on internal disk storage was within 6 GB of full (mostly due to increased numbers of digital images). Over the last months I have had flawless performance with portable Western Digital 160 and 120 GB USB2 drives (which I use with Second Copy 7 to synchronize systems in different locations) and so I decided to buy

Western Digital 500 GB My Book Studio Edition External Hard Drive
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000WGJZ44/dandillcom>

It supports USB2, Firewire 400/800 *and* (for the future) eSata 3 Gb/s, and on my Windows XP SP2 system the Firewire 800 interface it is about twice as fast (85 GB transferred to it in 40 minutes) as my USB 2 external drives. I paid US$210 (with tax) locally, versus Amazon's US$152. This disk is very quiet.
I see there are also 1 and 2 TB (!) versions

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000VZCEU8/dandillcom>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0016P7H3Q/dandillcom>

I hope this is helpful. Now, to learn how to use Acronis to avoid bare metal rebuilds...

Dan Dill

[David Burren]

The best price/capacity point for external drives around here is around the 500-750 GB mark.
Some retailers around here are offering Maxtor OneTouch III (FW400/FW800/USB2) drives for the same price as Maxtor OneTouch IV (USB2) drives, but they don't tell you up-front that the OT III drives only have one year warranty whereas the OT IV has a 5-year warranty (and now that Maxtor's just another Seagate brand I'm a bit more confident in those - I've used Seagate internal drives for years).

So a couple of months ago I bought a few 500GB Maxtor OneTouch IV drives.  Not a lot of time yet to report on the drive, but they seem good so far, and the 5-year warranty has to mean something...

You didn't mention whether the drive you're after is to be used for primary or secondary storage.  In my own setup the primary storage is only on SATA, Firewire, and NAS disks: the performance overhead of USB2 is too much (along with sensitivity to going through USB hubs).  I only use the USB2 drives for secondary storage: they're only connected for a short time each week (sometimes sooner) as their data is being refreshed, and they alternate spending a month away at off-site storage (packed in their original boxes for safety).  So the load that these drives will get is probably different to yours.
If you take reasonable precautions (e.g. most of my desktop primary storage is RAID-protected) the drive doesn't have to have perfect reliability (impossible anyway) and the major differentiators between drives will be performance and cost.

Note that some of the cheaper Firewire 400 enclosures (especially some using Prolific 3507 controllers) are cheap because the manufacturer has produced controller boards with duplicate Firewire GUIDs.  Recently I tried using two of these on the same machine and wondered why the whole Firewire bus locked up...  That shouldn't be an issue for "integrated" drives, but if you're putting drives into enclosures yourself it's something to watch for.

Cheers

[andris]

...just wanted to throw in a second vote for those WD MyBook Studio edition drives.  The multi interface insures I always have options...no matter what the client shows up on the set with.  eSATA is the only way to go when moving files on a tight deadline.  Western Digital drives have always treated me right in the past.

They fit particularly nicely with all cords in this Case Logic case: http://www.caselogic.com/adjustable_external_hard_drive_case/product_detail/index.cfm?modelid=106098 for mobile applications.

Andris

[Dierk]

Thanks for your experience reports. I was fortunate enough to get a pair of Seagate FreeAgent Pros at 1 TB after all. They are very well made with an all aluminium encasing with the translucent plastic strip on the narrow sides. The price is very good, they are a lot cheaper [over here] than four 500 GB HDs, giving them a really good price-per-MB ratio.

For the past 4 days they are running smoothly and silently, not getti8ng too warm but warm enough to give me confidence in their heat sinks. In contrast to my former FW-chain with the Maxtor One Touch III the whole chain now actually worls, as in: according to the IEEE 1394 standard. I could re-chain in all those devices formerly taken out, they can be switched on and off, taken out or re-chained without any of the Seagates going AWOL or taking the whole system down in a flash. In short: It looks like the Maxtor One Touch III was badly designed in every conceivable aspect.

Since the OTIII had died already and the warranty period was over I took a scredriver to it - an actual one, not the longdrink - and found some amazing things. First of all, the casing I assumed to be made of cheap sheet metal was actually a blend made of cheap plastic enclosing a solid but still cheap sheet metal encasing. No wonder the outer shell never warmed up, none of the used materials work as heat sinks. That is probably the reason Maxtor decided on a fan within the case, a very flimsy one, which could only move the air within the box since the inner casing has only very small inefficient holes, which were used as vents but not designed as such. They are the ususal fixation points for production or blends. At least the HD couldn't gather dust in any amount - simply no place to let it in.

I am not sure why the FW chaining didn't work well since the chip on the board comes from Oxford; probably a flaky early version, a B-product or just killed by heat. Did I mention that the power supply wasn't suitably buffered, that is, any slight surge from the power supply came through to the board?

What is most curious is the fact that the older Maxtor One Touch II design was obviously much better. Though I have mine removed from the computer for the time being, it ran for several years without ever giving problems. One reason is surely the encasing, which is completely aluminium warming up considerably but not dangerously when the drive is used, showing that the heat sinking works.

On another note, I found out that you'll always lose data when something goes wrong. I use one external HD as my main repository for photos, a second is set up as a mirror. I have a secondary back-up on DVDs, which is done every few weeks. Taking out the old HD, putting in the new one, saving back the mirror ... and finding out that about 400 photos are missing.

Well, most of them had just been renamed, though I don't know why this hasn't propagated. Around 10% were still missing from the mirror, half of them have been lost completely. For reasons beyond me they were neither on the secondary back-up nor on the mirror HD. The remaining 20-25 I could locate on the DVDs - unfortunately on a disc coming up with endless amounts of CRC errors.