USB Hard Drives
 

I want to purchase a external hard drive to use for Time Machine, and know it must be the size of the internal or larger. What I don't know is what brands are good and which is recommended. I will go with a 500GB. I see many out there some with 1 year warranty and some with 3 to 5 years.

go w/ a seagate HDD they will replace the drive out to 5 years...

Thanks, I will put that one on my list.

i've heard good things about LaCie. Personally I have had great luck with Western Digital

The following is almost all my opinion, so please take it that way, not as fact:

First of all, think about what you actually need. USB hard drives are inferior to FireWire hard drives unless you
1. Have a brand new MacBook, a MacBook Air, or old old colored iBook that doesn't have FireWire, or
2. You have to connect the drive to a Time Capsule that requires a USB drive.

If you aren't in either of the two camps above, then you would be better off with a FireWire drive. Even if you ARE in one of the camps above, a more versatile option is a drive that offers both USB and FireWire interfaces.

But that said, look for a case that has the following attributes:

1. Adequate cooling--the most common way to destroy a hard drive is through excessive heat
2. External power. Although bus-power is very convenient, it is rare for a USB bus-powered drive to get adequate power from the bus. FireWire bus-powered drives are more successful, as FireWire gives much more power on it's bus, but they have their own issues (you can blow your FireWire PHY too easily when hot-plugging FW bus-powered drives.) It's always best in my opinion to have an external power supply, or at least the option of an external power supply.
3. An on/off switch. Drives that are on all of the time are prone to power problems
4. A good quality hard drive inside the case. This is very important. Maxtor drives, for example, tend to fail quickly. But they are cheap, so a lot of case makers count on the end-user not looking in the case, or not knowing any better, so they use a lot of Maxtor drives in their cases. This is unfortunate.

In my opinion, Seagate and Hitachi drives are the fastest (with the possible exception of the Western Digital Raptors and Velociraptors). Hitachi drives run the coolest and quietest. Western Digital is another "economy" drive (except for their Raptor and Velociraptor lines which are expensive), but they tend to make a higher quality drive than Maxtor does. Samsung has a new line of drives that are fast and quiet, the Spinpoint F1 drives, and are the up-and-comer in the hard drive world. The other hard drive manufacturers like Fujitsu and Toshiba are not doing a lot of innovation, they're kind of the "also-rans".

Trevor

All your information I will take under advisement, but what I have seen is that many drives don't mention which drive is installed. Unless of course you buy a WD or another with a five year warranty. Some see see have three year. I will stay away from the 1 year. I will have to stay in budget as I just spent 2500 on the iMac.

Yes, that's true, and that is why I buy empty hard drive cases with the bridge board and the features that I want, and buy the hard drive separately, then install the drive in the case myself. That way I know what drive I have.

Trevor

That might be the way to go, but it is also much more expensive.

I have had good luck buying combination FireWire and USB drives at macsales.com.

I have looked there, and their prices are a little high, but it might be better quality.

Remember not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. In my opinion, it's worth it to pay a little more to get stuff that will work dependably for a long time, especially when the subject at hand is hard drives, which carry our valuable data. Buying the absolute cheapest junk means you get junk (cough...Maxtor...overheating...cough...disappearing data), and you're back here asking us how to retrieve your data from your crashed hard drive. And at that point, we may have to tell you, well, you can do it, but it's really expensive.

Trevor

I never buy junk as you can see by the fact I bought the iMac 24" 3.06 4gb of ram. But I do have to stay in budget.

I have to agree with Trevor here too, noting your budget constraints obviously as well.
On MacTalk Australia there are so many posts about forum members buying elCheapo USB drives " and now it won't work "
I would never buy just a USB drive for a start.
Firewire is a must, or at a minimum USB + Firewire interfaces.
It is just so much more robust as a protocol and is essential if you want to Target Disk Mode from it or boot from a drive. OK maybe not the latest Intel Macs .
Any external drive I have setup for myself or friends , I have bought a good quality case with an Oxford chipset and then a Seagate ( 5 yr Warr. ) inside it.
I haven't regretted any I have put together.
On the other hand , lots of people I know ( Mac and PC users ) have complained ad infinitum about crappy USB boxes failing after 6 months or less.

Stewie

I already found a Seagate drive with firewire and BSB 2.0 in my price range and it has a five year warranty. When I get my next check I will place the order.

If you are going to use the FireWire then try to get an Oxford chipset. This chipset translates, if you will, the FireWire data into data the hard drive understands, ATA or SATA. Macs work well with the Oxford chipset, and sometimes have trouble with other ones.

How do you know what chipset is being used? None of the technical information mentions chipset. At this time I have a Western Digital USB 2.0 Hard Drive as a file server, just 120 GB is to small for Time Machine. I haven't had to many problems with it so far on the iMac. Manner of fact I had much more problems on my Dell.

It's mentioned on the macsales.com site. Here is one example with an Oxford 912 chipset.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../MAU8F7320G16/

No it's not. It's cheaper.
You can buy an empty case for $10-40, and pick up an OEM internal SATA drive for it. A 500GB SATA drive goes for between $60-100 on newegg.
The 500GB external USB drives are all over $100, most of better brands more like $170.

I would definitely suggest picking up a $40 USB/Firewire enclosure, and my personal choice for drives are the WD RE series. They're more server-class drives, rated for high mileage, but work just fine in external enclosures. I've got 2 RE2 500GB's that my wife's been lugging around for DJ gigs for over 3 years now. They're going for about $90-100 right now. So for $130 you could put together your own external rig with a better quality drive than any pre-made enclosures come with.

I will check on my budget and then make a final choice, for sure I will not buy a drive with a one year warranty. I looked at a Seagate and a WD. Also Simpletech sells a drive with a three year warranty, which is not as good as the five year I saw on a WD.

WD is good about their warranties too.
I bought a cheap used rig for my dad that had a fried Raptor drive in it. Went on the website and popped in the serial number, and they said it was under warranty. Sent me a brand new one, without even having any proof of purchase. I was a bit tickled at that.

I have had good luck with WD and they are on the short list.

I was looking at getting a Maxtor until I read this thread - what are your thoughts on the 5 year warranty offered on the following:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/137004

I had a Lacie FW enclosure before and the drive in that died twice in 3 years (once under warranty). I was looking for something that came with a bit more reassurance as the new one will be my time machine drive for 2 macs (has to be USB unfortunately). I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this one... especially Trevor.

thanks

I would stay away from Maxtor as they have a high failure rate. I have heard both good and bad things about the Lacie drives. Maybe do a search on Google. "Failure rate of Lacie external drives" which I just did and here is the page. http://www.google.com/search?q=Failu...GGL_en___US299

thanks for the link - top hit on the page took me to the www.datlabs.co.uk website. Interestingly the page on Maxtor there indicates that their enclosures now contain Seagate hard disks where you see "OneTouch". That might explain why the Maxtor OneTouch that I am looking at now has a 5 year warranty with it...

Just FYI, LaCie doesn't make their own drives either. I've found various brands inside LaCie enclosures.

Well I opened my wallet and bought a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB drive for $67.95 including tax. Staples is closing them out. Easy to install using the iMac disk utility. i am now running time machine and have a WD 120 for storage.

Jasen - yes, its really annoying. What is worse is that google have spent years buying hard disks for their server farms and published a report a few years ago teasing us that they found significant differences in reliability across HD manufacturers... but wouldnt name them.

Joel - I have just purchased the 750GB Maxtor OneTouch drive, £82 (thats about $120 in US!). hope its going to be reliable - it will be a TM drive for two laptops in my house (not used for anything else).

Good luck with your purchase, chances are it will never fail. I wanted either a lifetime warranty or the five year warranty. I felt that I got a great deal on this one with a five year warranty.

Yeah, that's a good price, I would have bought that if it was that cheap too.

Hi Chris,

Sorry, it looks like I'm posting a bit late. Realize that opinions on hard drives are worth what you pay for them, especially including mine.

The problem is that all of us (with the possible exception of companies like Google) are working off of too-small of a sample base. I've had problems with Maxtor, but that means absolutely nothing in a statistical sense, and I've not used any of their drives since their ownership changed hands, meaning that the Maxtors of today might have no relationship to the Maxtors of yesteryear. You will probably have trouble-free results with a Maxtor hard drive.

Trevor

You're completely right there - its frustrating that google didnt share that information (its obviously worth money to them). Its also hard to judge from amazon reviews etc, as most people give positive 5* reviews a week after receiving the drive - "wow its got lots of space and it worked when i plugged it in" kind of thing.

Shame none of the computer magazines use long-term stress-testing in their reviews... it just leaves me looking at how long the warranty is. Never a guarantee of longevity, but a 5yr warranty on a seagate drive does give me reassurance.

A lot of the posts above focus on the drive itself, and while that is certainly the most important part, an external is a package - and the package is only as good as the sum of its parts.

I look for:
- metal case
- external power supply
- fan
- reputable manufacturer: I don't worry too much about the particular chipsets - unless you subscribe to industry electronics publications you'll never keep up with what's flawed and what's fixed.
- multiple interfaces
- cables included
- a fair (not necessarily cheap) price

What's inside? I leave that to the "reputable manufacturer" to decide. As mentioned above, we don't have enough statistical samples.

Cables included may seem petty, but if the manufacturer is including rare cables like eSATA then they are probably not being cheap elsewhere.

The external power supply is not optional - heat is a major factor in any electronic component's lifespan and putting the power supply somewhere else just makes sense. My one (acquired) internal-supply drive runs much hotter than the (purchased) separate supply.

I've recently purchased 2 500Gb LaCie D2 Quadras. One for me and one for the office server. Aluminum box, USB/FW400/FW800/eSATA. Haven't run them al that long but they passed the infant mortailty stage.

One thing to consider - the very large externals (terabyte-class) are 2+ drives and a RAID card in a box. Of course you should have backups on other media but if your RAID array hiccups you will be shafted much deeper than with a single drive.

regarding RAID, I think acme is right - unless you can turn the RAID into a mirrored one. This will effectively halve the storage capacity, but you then have a 'double backup'. Not every double-drive enclosure allows this.

My step-dad has been buying Lacie drives for years - they give good performance over firewire 400 and 800 and he hasnt had issues. But, they only give 2 years warranty and I'm in a 'once burnt, twice shy' situation since my last Lacie drive died twice in 3 years.

Interestingly, I have just looked and the replacement drive I got from Lacie (while under warranty) was a Seagate, so you never can tell.

Until the other day I didn't realize that Seagate and Maxtor are the same company. I prefer Seagate over Maxtor any day as I have had many problems over the years with Maxtor internal drives. I am running a Western Digital 24/7 for over five years without a problem. This new external drive is my first Seagate drive. I have read great reviews for the Free Agent drives, so I am not to concerned. Also a metal enclosure is a must if you are traveling with it. If not it doesn't matter at all.

False Advertising by Seagate
 

This morning I decided to install the Seagate diagnostics and power saving application. The software would not install. The box clearly says, "Energy Saving software and diagnostics" well to make a long story short I called tech support. After waiting a short time on line the tech tells me that the software is only for the Firewire 800 drives. My box and drive is USB 2.0. So in plain words they falsely advertise the software on the box. The tech even agreed with me, but said there is nothing they can do. I can get other software, and the iMac should do the energy saving by itself, but I hate being taken! Feels good to vent.

thats an over-simplification - Seagate make drives for other companies and when they are used, the brand "OneTouch" is added to the name. Not all Maxtor enclosures will have a Seagate drive inside, but any labelled as "OneTouch" should:
http://www.datlabs.co.uk/maxtor-drive-data-recovery.htm
(this assumes that datlabs know what they are talking about)

sounds like grounds for a full refund, if you are unhappy with the drive. SMART is the usual way of keeping aware of the health of your disk drives, but the signals dont get transmitted through all enclosures. this might be the cause of the difference between USB and firewire connections, but i am only guessing.

Go to Disk utility and click on the drive - you should see "SMART Status" listed somewhere below.

Follow up I wrote a email to Seagate and received a response stating that the tech led me down a wrong path. The diagnostics is available and the power saving is done by the iMac. So basically the energy saver feature is only supported by the OS, but the diagnostics is available by download.

Maxtor drive is now here and in use as a time machine store. Had a problem initially as it needed formatting to get rid of the NTFS that it came with - and I found that my iBook running Leopard (10.5.5) kept failing to either partition it or re-format it. Found a knowledgebase article on the Maxtor website (dont have the link, sorry) where they said that it is a problem with Disk Utility in Leopard. Their work-around was to boot from a Tiger install DVD and use DU from there. And it worked. Wierd. Had no problems on formating and partitioning the Western Digital USB drive I have.

I havent tested whether I can format it on my new Macbook, so it might just be a PPC Leopard problem.

Oh, and yes its a Seagate drive - lots of Seagate mentions in the user manual.