External drives [Matthew's Journal]

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Dear lazyweb...

I need a largeish (say ~1 TB) external drive (idealy firewire 800) to backup my work machine (a Mac Pro). I don't want Lacie (too many problems with the previous Lacies), nor to buy from Dabs (they were crap the second time the bloody thing failed within a few months); any suggestions of things / suppliers to go for or avoid, please?

Thanks :)

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There are 12 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I bought a Seagate Freeagent Desk Mac 1TB from eBuyer for backup purposes at home. I'd say "It hasn't failed yet" - but I've not had it long, and I don't want to cause it to fail today. ;-)

Seagate 5y warranty was my main motivation to pick it.
ETA Other motivation was that it had USB2 and FW400/800.

Edited Date: 2009-03-23 03:38 pm (UTC)

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I'm quite happy with the FreeCom I have, although mine is 500Gb not 1Tb. I got it from Amazon. TekHeads are quite good too.

Can you not use USB2 instead of FireWire 800? You'll get a lot more choice if you can, and lower prices (although slightly lower transfer rates).

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Yeah, USB2 would probably be OK (hence my "ideally" :) )

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Western Digital from Scan is the normal next step after Lacie from Dabs.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1TB-Western-Digital-MyBook-Studio-Edition-35-USB-20-FireWire-400-Firewire-800-eSata looks plausible.

There was one batch of WD MyBooks (sadly including the one I bought in 2007) which shipped with a unique cable which looked very like firewire400 but cross-wired +48V and data; I suspect they won't make that mistake again.

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I second the recommendation of the WD MyBooks. My boss and I each have one running on the RAID system which double backs-up all our video observation data and interview tapes, which is good for our paranoid midnight 'argh, what if all the hard drives fail' panics. Plus they look pretty and have firewire 400/800 and USB connections.

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Ebuyer.

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Seagate are good.

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(Also, Tesco are often price-competitive with what you get online, with the advantage that you can walk away with the bloody thing.)

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I have previously bought two usb2 external hard drives from PC World, of all places, for that very reason. It helped that the "Collect@Store" price on the web was lower than the normal in-store price.

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As always, these guys are your friends. This outfit are as far removed from cowboys as you'll find, and no, I don't get commission from them.

Strange that you've had problems with LaCie external drives; if anything they've behaved much better with my Macs over the years than those from other manufacturers, but then again YMMV. Wonder who made the actual drives inside the enclosures?

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NAS, USB, or Firewire?

What I would do is price buying a drive case with the appropriate interface, and then fit a good quality drive - maybe a Western Digital. I have a couple of WD external drives that were cheaper than the parts, one 160G and one 500G - good so far.

Two I spotted that I would consider myself are an Iomega eGo 1TB USB External Hard Drive 3.5" Hot Swappable Black and a Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1TB 2x FireWire / USB 2.0 / eSATA-300 16MB Buffer External HDD both just over 120.

Edited Date: 2009-03-23 06:29 pm (UTC)

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We just bought a Western Digital 1TB without the firewire or eSATA. It has worked fine so far.

One of the Norwegian shops we often buy things from does UK and Ireland sales too: http://www.komplett.co.uk/

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Matthew's Journal

External drives

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