500GB Choices

LSPIII · 21 Aug 2006 at 20:06

So... It's been a while. Haven't posted on these forums in ages. Thought I'd start out by asking some advice.

I have (had) 2 Lacie 250GB External hard drives. I say had, as one of the drives suffered unrecoverable mechanical failure after just 14 months of use. Needless to say, I was a little peaved to lose 250GB of data. Classic response from Lacie of course - we recommend you backup all your data - which would be handy if this wasn't the backup drive! Anyways, rant over.

I now have an external enclosure begging for a new disk, and after deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that it is sensible for me to look at 500GB disks. Yes I will fill it...

Basically, what should I be looking at. I'm increibly tempted by the Western Digital MyBook External drive (as the auto-switch-off is a nice feature), however the one year warranty doesn't exactly inspire me. If I look at internal drives (IDE only for the enclosure), I am fairly limited in choice. The cheapest at OcUK is the Hitachi drive, but I have never used them before. Are they any good?

To put this in perspective: the drive that died was a Seagate. This is now the third Seagate drive I have had fail on me (OK, over a number of years, but all failures have been Seagate drives), therefore I am disinclined to look at their options. People seem to be having issues with Maxtor drives (although the 4 I am running have been goin in Raid 0 for 3 years without even wincing).

Thanks for your time people.

LSPIII · 21 Aug 2006 at 20:11

And on another note...

I currently have one Western Digital 74GB Raptor (8MB cache version)... I am tempted to get another to raid them up. Is it worth it? Do bear in mind that the extra space will come in handy (I plan on having a major hard drive re-shuffle).

Cheers.

scott.holmes · 21 Aug 2006 at 20:30

Well, for the actual external drive, id be looking at a DIY version. Buy a 500gb HDD and then find an enclosure you like. Much better that way imo, you get the full 3 or 5 year warranty as its a normal HDD drive, and the enclosures can be had for around £30 depending what you want.

Personally for me, ive bought nothing but WD, mainly cos of their execllent service, but now id be tempted with a new 7200.10 Seagate. WDs tend to be a bit noisy!

As for another Raptor to raid, waste of money IMO. For the same price u could probably pick up another 320gb HDD and use that for extra space in your PC.

Behemoth · 21 Aug 2006 at 23:14

Western Digital or Seagate to be honest mate, I don't know if Samsung do a 500 gig drive yet, but if they did I'd give one of those some serious consideration. I've got a 160 gig drive of theirs in an ICY box and it really id a great drive

jimblowscash · 22 Aug 2006 at 09:47

i have been using a lacie 500gb d2 model for six months, that has a hitatchi inside... all seems ok with that, and the warrenty is 2 years on them.

the mybook looked ok, but having seen one in the flesh, there quite flimsy plastic cases, so i went for the chunky alloy lacie

joey1211 · 23 Aug 2006 at 14:49

LSPIII said:
I was a little peaved to lose 250GB of data. Classic response from Lacie of course - we recommend you backup all your data - which would be handy if this wasn't the backup drive!

This may be stating the obvious but a backup drive stores a copy of the data that you have elsewhere i.e. you have two copies of the same data. When one goes, you have the other to fall back on.

Backup does not mean moving your data from one place to another.

LSPIII · 23 Aug 2006 at 18:14

joey1211 said:
This may be stating the obvious but a backup drive stores a copy of the data that you have elsewhere i.e. you have two copies of the same data. When one goes, you have the other to fall back on.

Backup does not mean moving your data from one place to another.

True, however it was actually a backup of data on a different drive which I borked myself. I was trying to get the backup back on to the original drive when it went **** up. I guess you could say it was my fault for borking the first drive, but when you have the safety net of a backup you tend to be a little more lax with things. Never mind!

LSPIII · 23 Aug 2006 at 23:00

Well seeing as so many people have been raving about Seagates, I'll give them one more chance. It's a shame that OcUK don't do the 500GB IDE 7200.10 drive though. I had to source it from elsewhere. Hopefully this one won't die on me though. Cheers guys