Need External HD advice

[sirwilliam]

Friend is running out of space and needs more room...externally.

I was going to recommend an external USB Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital HD? I really wanted the best and most reliable to for $100. I like Seagate the best.

Please give me your input. THanks!

[chicken n waffles]

stay awa from western digital, especially the passport drives. i've had lots of problems with those, both on mac and pc hardware.

you can't go wrong with seagate.

[Libra Monkee]

Come to think of it, I've never bought an actual external HD. I usually pick an an OEM hard drive then shove it in to a
cheap external enclosure. You can usually get more storage for less money that way. But I usually stick with Maxtor or Seagate for the drives.

[sirwilliam]

Come to think of it, I've never bought an actual external HD. I usually pick an an OEM hard drive then shove it in to a
cheap external enclosure. You can usually get more storage for less money that way. But I usually stick with Maxtor or Seagate for the drives.

Same. WD has been having a lot of problems lately.

[complacent]

I say screw all of that noise and just get some RAID.

There's no point to not do it with today's prices and technology (IMHO.)

You've got too many connection options, some of which are as fast as an internal SATA connection.

[Libra Monkee]

^^^ There's that option too. I still plan to get a Drobo, fill it with high capacity (500+ GB) hard drives, throwing it on the network, and consolidating the data that I currently have spread throughout many computers and hard drives into one big NAS.

[chicken n waffles]

and consolidating the data that I currently have spread throughout many computers and hard drives into one big NAS.

[Sabre]

^^^ There's that option too. I still plan to get a Drobo, fill it with high capacity (500+ GB) hard drives, throwing it on the network, and consolidating the data that I currently have spread throughout many computers and hard drives into one big NAS.

Check out the NORCO 500 (I have one) or the 600, much cheaper, supports RAID 5 etc. etc.

[complacent]

^^^ There's that option too. I still plan to get a Drobo, fill it with high capacity (500+ GB) hard drives, throwing it on the network, and consolidating the data that I currently have spread throughout many computers and hard drives into one big NAS.

Check out the NORCO 500 (I have one) or the 600, much cheaper, supports RAID 5 etc. etc.

Call me old fashioned or whatever, but I still prefer a hardware raid solution...

[Sabre]

Sadly, unless you want to go PCI-E, there are no (last time I looked... 6 months ago) hardware RAID 5 solutions that are PCI (or PCI-X), and can handle 5+ eSATA drives (which usually means a port multiplier is needed). Now there might be a $1000 one, but I wasn't looking that high.

I will DEFINITELY go HW RAID when I can with this setup Till then, Windows, FreeBSD and Linux all support software RAID's that can do the job (maybe just not as quickly!). This is for home anyway, I would never recommend it in a production environment.

[scheherazade]

Get :
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.a ... 68&ID=1642

Then just start storing HDDs on a shelf like books.

-scheherazade

[Libra Monkee]

This is for home anyway, I would never recommend it in a production environment.

[avriette]

I say screw all of that noise and just get some RAID.

There's no point to not do it with today's prices and technology (IMHO.)

You've got too many connection options, some of which are as fast as an internal SATA connection.

This man speaks truth. MTBF on drives is so bad these days, you never buy them in ones. We got the tiniest, cheapest drives in our new Mac, but we got two of them, mirrored them, and boot off them. At work, my desktop (which holds all our virtual machines, system images, my personal music stuff, and lots more) has a LaCie "Biggest Quadra" on it. I beat the living hell out of it (imagine, running an mp3 player off it, a Windows XP guest, a Windows Vista guest, and a Solaris 5.11 guest, and swap off the same volume), and we just bought another, bigger one for our new goliath science machine.

External drives, I like LaCie. At home we have six or so 250's (you can probably get these on ebay for like $100, and if it breaks, unscrew it and toss a new drive in it), on a raid 5, serially with 1394b. We use this raid for all our music and video, because, dammit, we paid for it, and I won't tolerate "oh the drive died." I have had that happen to me twice, (both before 2002) and both times I lost things I could never replace. The first one included the first programs I'd ever written. I'm thirty now, and I would do anything to have a peek back at the code I was writing at 11-12 years old. Gone.

Don't go with one drive, man. Don't buy cheap. It's not worth it.