I want to buy a 1 TB usb external hard drive to load my music. Please give me a feedack whether to buy a Western Degital, Maxtor or another brand. Please consider reliabilty, portability, warranty and read/writ issues with your recommedation. Thanks! dj Mosali

Wrong forum

But

Western Digital

Gawd no. I'd get a Seagate drive.

all drives fail. after over 10 years in IT i can assure you that EVERY brand fails.

Getting a single drive (of any capacity) and saving all your music on it is equal to suicide.
If you looking for something of 1Tb capacity or higher, go with one of the network storage units. Most of the time they support multiple drives and RAID, so there is some kind of fault tolerance.


I have 2 identical 250Gb LACiE drives that are exact mirrors of each other. I can always take 1 with me if i have to, and if one fails, i always have the second one with all my crap on it.


backup your music.

I agree with solefald... We can't trust a unique hard drive, some kind (scsi/sas) of drives are just more robust but all will fail given a certain time.

I have two WD 500Gb USB (on my server rsynced every-night) it's a good compromise capacity/security/price.
Think about spending a little more money in it but it's nothing compared to a loss of data
An other solution is to buy an external HD which support natively RAID (and comes with two drives), some LaCie (for example) drives are label as 1Tb AND 500Gb depending on the RAID mode. For you, it's a single box, but if one drive fall, your music is safe.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: G r i b o u i l l e,

LaCie

I'm in the computer biz as well but as far as performance and reliability go, Seagate is at the top of my pile.

I've had more out-of-the-box failures with WD than I care to mention, consistent failures for Hitachi laptop drives around the 3-4 year marks, problems with noise from Maxtor drives, yet Seagate pulls strong.

See, I've had the exact opposite experience with WD, every drive I've ever used by them has been perfect.

Maxtor I refuse to use, period. 2222 many problems.

Seagate I'm "meh" on. I've only used 2 of their drives.

The primary HD in my computer is actually a SATA Samsung, and it's running strong.

I've owned pretty much every type of HDD there is and the only type I've ever had that didnt fail on me was an IBM drive. I don't know that they are even making HDDs anymore.

I've had plenty of WDs fail, even more Maxtors, and even a handful of Seagates.

As Solefald said, make sure you use some sort of redundant system rather than a single TB drive or a RAID 0 setup. RAID 5 is okay, but i've had 2 drives in a RAID 5 array fail at the same time and loose everything.

Your best bet is to get either a 2 or 4 disc system that can run RAID 1 (or 10 or 0+1). you loose half your storage space, but having a mirrored drive is so much more secure.

I use a 1.6TB ReadyNAS system from Infrant (who have now been bought out by Netgear). It's not portable, but it works great.

If you want something that is somewhat portable, check out the LaCie 2big Triple. It will run RAID 1 and you can get them from 1-2 TB.

I also have a friend that uses a WD My Book Pro II with his Powerbook and it has never given him any trouble. Dual disc system so it can be mirrored, and it is in the more affordable range.

Another option would be just to buy THREE identical (however big) drives you want; use one as your primary, another as your backup, and leave one at home; just mirror the three of them. This might (oddly) be the most economical solution.

That's also what I do - don't have to fudge around with RAID etc (and it's not like I couldn't - I, like many of you, have been in the computer biz for a while.)

-r-

There's a cool system available called Drobo. It's an advanced external RAID system which allows you to use anywhere from 1-4 drives of any capacity and it automatically configures them for you to maximize your storage, redundancy and speed.

$500 for the enclosure but it could well be worth it but not necessarily for "at the gig".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Pulse,

Pulse's HTML is broken...

-r-

I have a 500gb seagrave and a 500gb western digital. One for backup of the first. (I would hate to lose all my stuff, because of one hardrive crapping out) I haven't had a prob with either one. I'm looking forward to a laptop having 500+ hardrive so everything will fit in one unit.
Dutch.

i cant imagine having to clone data over 3 separate drives. RAID 1 is so much easier.

drobo is pretty cool for a home storage solution, i might consider one if i didn't already have a dedicated NAS.

RAID 1 might be easier, but it requires special hardware for external. I prefer to just have 3 generic USB enclosures. I use a sync/backup program called in-sync to do all my syncing for me so it's no hassle (except for the time it takes to actually do the sync, which is usually 10 mins or less depending on how much I have to sync).

-r-