Good, Reliable external hard drive

Get the one with the best warranty. No platter-based drive is more or less reliable than another.

G-Tech.

You get what you pay for. Look at how G-Tech drives are constructed and you'll get some idea about the calibre of equipment you're dealing with. Available via the Apple Store and certain resellers. Not sure if the big-box stores carry them.

I would just look at the warranty, or just buy an enclosure and stick in your own hard drive. yes, G-Techs are built well, but the limiting factor, durability-wise, is still the drive that sits inside it.

Which reminds me . . .

Sometimes it isn't the drive itself that fails but the HD controller, the other electronics, etc. Problem can be solved by removing the drive and getting a new enclosure for it. And there goes a good chunk of the money you sunk into the unit as a whole. Sometimes it's a crap-shoot.

So know what kind of drive you're getting. Know what the enclosure is like - durable? Heat dissipation? Fan (when it *should* ideally have one)?

You can have a top-end drive in a lousy enclosure and it won't last.

You need to figure worst-case scenario here: if you've determined that it's a quality drive in a sturdy, supportive and properly-ventilated (or heat dissipating) enclosure, then your only worry (all else being equal) is the other electronics inside that control the drive. This is probably your best position, as the likelihood of you losing your data is much lower (ideally, at least.)

In any case, if you've got the money, opting for G-Tech drives will stack the deck a little more in your favour. Great drives (some of them Hitachi enterprise class) with well-eingineered enclosures.

I bought a Macally enclosure and a Western Digital (2TB) drive from Amazon. I'm extremely happy plus the warrenty is longer than you usually see with pre-assembled drives. (3 years not 1)

Enclosure:
http://www.amazon.com/Macally-Hi-Speed-FireWire-Enclosure-G-S350SUAB2/dp/B003VTZFN4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1290533125&sr=8-1

Drive:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Intellipower-Desktop-WD20EARS/dp/B002ZCXK0I/ref=pd_cp_e_3

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™

*LTD* said:

G-Tech.

You get what you pay for. Look at how G-Tech drives are constructed and you'll get some idea about the calibre of equipment you're dealing with. Available via the Apple Store and certain resellers. Not sure if the big-box stores carry them.

Click to expand...

Sorry to bump this thread but I had to comment on G-Tech. The power supply of my G-Drive Q went belly-up in FEBRUARY and I rang customer service who said they'd send me out a new one. Nothing arrived. Phoned up and chased them several times over the last few months - each time promised they would send one out and apologised due to lack of stock. Tried contacting them by phone, email, twitter everything. Got absolutely nowhere. Eventually got someone last week who shipped a power supply out but it was the wrong one. Then I got a correct one sent out which doesn't work (I have an identical drive which if I use it's power supply does power up the other drive so it's definitely the power supply at fault).

My point being that as G-Tech seem to pride themselves on the higher 'creative professional' end of the market, they've completely shown how little they really will stand by their products should something go wrong. I've been waiting from mid-February to mid-June and it's still not fixed. I'm trashing the drive and buying a new enclosure from someone else.

Absolutely shocking company, they should be ashamed.

does it need to be portable, if not go with the OWC above. if it does, go with a WD passport 1TB (~100) and ultra portable with customer service/warranty

Meh, I would just stick with a traditional brand HDD vendor.

Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

Matthew9559 said:

Meh, I would just stick with a traditional brand HDD vendor.

Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

Click to expand...

What constitutes a "traditional" brand? OWC has been a respected supplier of Mac hardware for over 20 years. How much more "traditional" can you get?

Try Rocstor there pretty good for the price.

GGJstudios said:

What constitutes a "traditional" brand? OWC has been a respected supplier of Mac hardware for over 20 years. How much more "traditional" can you get?

Click to expand...

I would contribute that to part of the etc. portion of my sentence.

OWC is a great HDD vendor.

EDIT: I remember seeing a study from google several months ago testing a wide array of HDD's. Failure rates seem to be vendor independent from their research. http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.html

Matthew9559 said:

OWC is a great HDD vendor.

Click to expand...

OWC is not a HDD vendor. They just make enclosures.

I know your looking for fire-wire 800 but this HDD works like a charm -> Western Digital - WD Elements 1.5TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive
I have the 2TB model but it isn't showing up on the Best Buy page anymore. It may not be a fire-wire 800 but it has a transfer rate of 480mbps, you may be giving up some speed but this thing is only $80! I have had mine for a year now and I am very satisfied with it.

Matthew9559 said:

I remember seeing a study from google several months ago testing a wide array of HDD's. Failure rates seem to be vendor independent from their research. http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.html

Click to expand...

Actually, that paper says that failure rates ARE related to brand.

Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact.

Click to expand...

The paper does not LIST those statistics, however:

However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data.

Click to expand...