What Brand of Firewire drives do you use and why?

[rolo]

I have tried all of them. I have Three internal drives that I track to and have come to find that Western Digital Firewire drives (with oxford 911) have ALWAYS worked great for back ups. I have had crashes with Glyph, Maxtor, and Lacie drives but my 5 WD's are great. What do you all use and what bad experiences have you had with drives. thanks...rolo.

[emeline-rec]

Interesting. I have a Lacie D2 Triple I 500Gb and firewire 400 has broke so i'm left with usb and fw800. Not too bad unless i need to use it on a G4 powermac stuck with usb1. The drive seems to run very hot, guess I should check out the WDs.

Anyone else had trouble with Lacie?

[Dave Martin]

Three Lacies here in my room, and two or three more in the B room. One died last year, but I got a new one from Lacie (everything was backed up to another drive), and that's been fine.

The good thing about using them is that we can simply unplug the firewire connection and power and move them wherever we want. For that matter, a couple of guys do work for me on their own systems; they bring THEIR Lacies without the PS - easy to drag and drop a session over to those drives as well....

[AlexLakis]

I use both Lacie and WD drives. I've put WD drives (internal and external) thru hell for years, and they've always worked (although I've seen them go bad before in my comp tech days.) I've only really ever had one real problem, and it was with the Lacie triple. I once backed up a project from OSX to FAT32 (my Lacie is dual partitioned, one FAT32, one NTFS,) enforcing Mac/PC compatibility of course. In about 1 of every 30 audio files, there was a random 1 second dropout. I checked the drive for bad sectors, and it was fine. I deleted the files and backed them up again. Everything was fine the second time. Don't know why it happened...may have just been a file system conversion anomoly. No other problems to speak of.

[musicjon]

OWC Drives from www.macsales.com for me. I have two of them, zero problems.

[George Necola]

after the 3rd Westerndigital-crash, I changed to argosy.. no problem so far.. I think they use Maxtor I think..

its really not the brand, its the series and where they produce..

[ine-kpro...]

i use independent computer store external cases for my ide hd, no big name brand cases like lacie, etc. ive had many problems using external hard drives or burners if the external case are both usb and firewire capable. the firewire cases i use must have the 911 chipset or else it doesnt run properly. with osx, it seems to pick up the external cases with hds or burners regardless of whether its only firewire capable or both usb and firewire capable. i just stick to the 911 firewire cases cause ive never had a problem with them and my old g4 does not have usb2and i do not have pci room to fit a usb2 card in there.

usb2 apparently is more stable than firewire 400 i have been told.

[copperx]

Originally Posted by George Necola

its really not the brand, its the series and where they produce..

Dunno, but I read in some consumer report that Seagate drives have the lowest crash rates ...

[copperx]

Also,

Aurora's advanced Data Recovery Service Department can assist customers experiencing problems with Seagate hard disk drives. However modern Seagate drives are so reliable that we rarely see large numbers with physical defects.

Among the problems that we sometimes encounter on Seagate disk drives are problems with read heads and their pre-amplifiers, servo och positioning errors, re-calibration errors, complete corruption of the file system, unintentionel formatting or deletion of partitions or data, motor problems and last, but very rarely, a serious Seagate hard disk crash.
from: http://www.aurora.se/seagate-data-recovery.htm


Plus, I think they're the only ones that offer 5-year warranties.

YMMV.

[George Necola]

jap.. good drives..

if you wanna have security.. buy SCSI.. yes.. SCSI.. these days..

all the servers are running SCSI drives.. the specs for SCSI drives are doubling the IDE specs in terms of running time till first failure and stuff..

cheers

[dplitt]

I used 2 Maxtor external FW hard drives and I will never make that mistake again. Both have disappeared from my PC, never to be seen again by Windows. Maxtor's website says its a Windows Service Pack 2 issue but thats about the extent of their support. Live and learn, I guess.

[karl]

Drives going down is usually the luck of the draw. After years of reliability from Seagate, I had a brand new 160 go down within a month. Also with firewire drives they sometimes change what is used inside. So you're only talking about a case.

[6strings]

+1 OWC.

(Mercury Elite Pro series)

[shikawkee]

Weibetech and EZ Quest.

Two reasons:Reliability and customer service.
(Weibetech has a little better customer service FYI-)

[axissport]

Which of the external drives do you find quietest?
Are fanless drives safe ?

[shikawkee]

Originally Posted by axissport

Which of the external drives do you find quietest?
Are fanless drives safe ?

The Weibetech Tough Tech is my fave for fanless quiet and the ability to stay cool.
If properly designed fanless drives will stay cool during most normal use.
I wouldn't necessarily leave them on all the time though.

[Ricey]

another for OWC - happy! got 6 of them.
plus a WD Raptor in a FW800 case.
i haven't had any of these long enough to judge longevity. the larger OWC drives (500Gb) have a fan. they stay cool and quiet.

[azwun25]

Glyph uses Seagate drives I believe. I have a GT051 250gb. never a problem

[T.RayBullard]

I use LaCie and Maxtor. Used Crossfire in the past with great success.

anything with Oxford 911/912 chipset...

[Igotsoul4u]

I always put seagates inside my firewire drive cases. I have never had a seagate fail yet. I know they will fail at some point, but that point is 5+years of heavy use. Obviously drive maintenence plays an important part in the longevity of drives, but seagates seem to be able to put up with all sorts of crazy directory and frag problems way better then an other drives I have used. I guess their drive mechanism is more robust or just built better then other drives. As far as cases are concerned, I have been on the otherworldcomputing.com cases for the last 4 years. I started using them when I saw the pat metheny camp using them. They know how to put drives through the ringer with their millions of tracks constant transport from location to location, so I figured they were top quality. Definetly have had no problems with the mercury elite cases. They don't get very hot and are very quiet. Here is a list of drives that have failed, Lacie D2 - firewire ports stop workiing do to the actual contact points pulling out of the circuit board. They didn't use solder. I have had this happen on 10 different drives. They should be fine if you never plug and unplug the firewire cable, but thats not to convenient is it? Lacie Porsche - Drive failure (maxtors inside) Lacie couldn't even repair it. I also think the cases get way to hot. Maxtor - seen at least 6 harddrive failures. BOA cobra - 4 drive failures. The biggest issue between firewire drives is the actual brand of drive that is inside. I like other world computing because they will put whatever brand drive you want inside their kick ass cases. certain cases also use differnet brands of oxford chips of varying quality. i have only been told this and havn't researched it very much. Pacific pro audio makes a very big deal out this.

http://www.pacificproaudio.com/drives.asp

www.otherworldcomputing.com