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.