external hard drives

[monkeybort]

not quite camera hardware, but hardware nonetheless. 😛

i’m looking to get a 500 gb external hard drive for my mac – mostly to be used as a backup for my hard drive but i’m also planning on keeping my music files there as well as a chunk of my photos; everything that is completely post-processed and doesn’t need any further editing.

i’ve had a LaCie, and it stopped working. just stopped turning on at all. regardless, i feel like it was just a glitch in this particular unit, not an overall indictment of the brand.

any thoughts or recommendations? i’d kind of like to stay with LaCie as they are more mac-oriented, but at the same time i don’t want the same thing to happen to my next one and whoops! all my music is gone.

any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!!!!

[staplermofo]

A generic external usb hard drive enclosure and a 400gb Seagate (two if need be) and a pinky swear to back up on something more reliable?

[Encyclopedia Galactica]

Are you sure it’s the LaCie device? It could just be the HDD it contains. Those can be swapped easily enough…

[monkeybort]

Are you sure it’s the LaCie device? It could just be the HDD it contains. Those can be swapped easily enough…

heh, the only thing i’m sure of is when i plug it in and press the button, nothing happens. what is this ‘hdd’ and how can i check it?

😛

[Claff]

I’ve become a big fan of the aforementioned generic HDD enclosures and standard drives that can be swapped in and out with relative ease. I have one for 2.5″ drives (I seem to go through laptops about once a year so there’s plenty of drives to go through) and just got one for 3.5″ drives. Have no experience with dedicated external drives, though.

[veruca]

Are you sure it’s the LaCie device? It could just be the HDD it contains. Those can be swapped easily enough…

heh, the only thing i’m sure of is when i plug it in and press the button, nothing happens. what is this ‘hdd’ and how can i check it?

😛

the hdd is the hard (disk) drive located inside the external case. if the external hard drive you had won’t turn on it’s one of three possibilities; the power adapter for the drive may have died, the enclosure itself is broken, or the hard drive inside died. but i would think if the hard drive died the enclosure would still turn on.

if you decide to just chuck the old one make sure you get the right kind of enclosure. a lot of the newer hard drives are SATA whereas the older ones are just PATA (commonly known as IDE). so if you buy a SATA hdd make sure the enclosure is made for SATA or supports both formats.

i have a Penguin SATA external enclosure and my biggest complaint was one of the screws came loose in the front so now the cover just kind of hangs there, but YMMV.

oh and I hate Maxtor drives. especially the ones that come in Dell PowerEdge servers 🙂 high rate of failure. Western Digital ftw!

[monkeybort]

wow, thanks guys!!

i am such an idiot about this stuff and should have my computer card revoked. 😛 but really, thanks for the info, i will do some more shopping and let you know what i come up with!

[Elsinore]

Second the complaint against Maxtor. Used to love ’em, had a couple fail, now won’t bother with them, though we do have one left that’s working ok. Had good luck with Samsung and Western Digital.

[staplermofo]

More important than brand is target user. Enterprise class hard drives are going to last longer than desktop hard drives, and the price difference is tiny when you don’t worry about blazing performance.

Seriously though man, back stuff up on something safer. Two copies of everything on safe media! Everything! At least twice!
If you don’t, oh teh laments! All your files will die! All of them! DVDRs are cheap! Get in the habit of backing up everytime you move stuff to your computer. Make a special folder for stuff that hasn’t been backed up yet, beat yourself with a cat o’ nine tails every day they stay in limbo, one lash per file over what it would take to fill your back up medium of choice! Write yourself reminders in the resulting blood! Back up!

[monkeybort]

ha, stapler, i do back everything up on dvd. as soon as i load a shoot on my computer my first stop is toast. i don’t have many of my post-processed stuff backed up, but i do have all original files of everything i’ve ever shot or scanned on dvd or cd.

🙂

[staplermofo]

Look what just popped up on slickdeals:
400gb, $100:
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4799749
5 year warranty to boot.

Aren’t you just the luckiest?

[Author]

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