Recommendation for hard disk

I like and trust these
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

Any drive can/will fail but I favor Hitachi drives like this one:
7K750

horace528 said:

Hello MacRumors Forums
Today marks my 2nd hard disk to break. I'm pretty much sick of this process happening over and over again.
I want to find a reliable company for hard drives, or just any hard drive. I'm a video editor, so I need a reliable hard disk with high security and one that does not break that easily. Preferably 500GB to 1TB of size. But I would want a product that has a reliable price, not like something of a 200$ price tag.
USB 2.0 is preferred. Not that there would be a USB 1.1 hard drive in the market today. 😀 Maybe even USB 3.0 😉


Hope you can help me. 😀

Click to expand...

If you're a video editor, USB 2.0 won't cut it.... imho...
I prefer FW800 for editing... and soon, hopefully a Thunderbolt set up.

I like G-TECH drives.... Personal favorites, I have 3... 1 is a 500GB, and 2 of them are 2TB... all hooked up through FW800.

http://www.videoguys.com/Item/G-Technology+G-RAID+4TB++eSATA,+USB2++FireWire/33732303037403.aspx

horace528 said:

Hello MacRumors Forums
Today marks my 2nd hard disk to break. I'm pretty much sick of this process happening over and over again.
I want to find a reliable company for hard drives, or just any hard drive. I'm a video editor, so I need a reliable hard disk with high security and one that does not break that easily. Preferably 500GB to 1TB of size. But I would want a product that has a reliable price, not like something of a 200$ price tag.
USB 2.0 is preferred. Not that there would be a USB 1.1 hard drive in the market today. 😀 Maybe even USB 3.0 😉


Hope you can help me. 😀

Click to expand...

If you need reliable then what you want is some type is RAID. The simplest is a mirror (aka "RAID-0"). These systems can continue to operate after a drive fails. I think most video and audio editors are using RAID. The bigger systems are using something like RAID5 or RAID10 but for smaller systems RAID0 is the best option.

The price can be steep but if your job depends on it what is an extra $200? The company to look at is "g-tech". maybe one of these
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-raid.cfm

ChrisA said:

The simplest is a mirror (aka "RAID-0").

Click to expand...

Actually, mirror is RAID-1.

RAID-0 is striped. It can be as much as n times as fast (at thorughput) as a single drive where n is the number of drives). The downside it it cuts reliability by a divisor of n, since if any one drive fails, you have data loss.

RAID-1 is mirrored. It's a naive' attempt at improving reliability, but not much used any more.

Higher levels of RAID can improve reliability dramatically. With the right hot-swap equipment, you can remove a drive, replace it with a blank drive, while the system is running, and not lose anything. With the right hardwae controller, it can also improve throughput.

You will need an internal PCIe card (needs Mac Pro) or Thunderbolt for maximum transfer speed. USB2 makes pretty-much all this moot.

Have you thought of trying a USB3/SATA docking station?

Some to check out:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_n...ords=usb3+sata+dock&rh=i:aps,k:usb3+sata+dock

I noticed "security" in your post. If you want to physically secure the drives, just eject them from the dock and lock them in a desk drawer or safe.

A docking station makes it easy to replace a failing drive. Just get another bare drive, put it in.

There are now dual docks that can "replicate" disk drives, as well.

There are many great carrier-less docks for SATA drives. I have two in my Linux system (which uses an internal, non-docked SSD for the system and user filesystems), and an external "toaster". I'm a big fan of these, and they are all relatively inexpensive. Much better than the old days when you needed to screw drives into some goofy and expensive carrier if you wanted to be able to easily remove and replace them.

See "Cougar extreme" Thread

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1527250/

If you want reliability, you want a RAID-1 enclosure with 2 drives at least, so that you can tolerate a drive failure.


ALL drives will fail at some point. ALL manufacturers have a percentage of drives that fail early. Buying brand X because it is considered more reliable and relying on that may end in tears.

If your data is important, don't trust any single drive with it - ensure you have at least 2 copies at all times.


Note: RAID is not a replacement for backups. Human error happens, and so does theft.


And as to RAID1 being naive and not used very much any more? BS. It is often used in enterprise SANs combined with RAID0 (striping across a RAID1 mirror) to give a good mix of speed and reliability. It is often used as the system drive RAID level for maximum reliability.

For write heavy workloads it is much faster than RAID5 or RAID6. It is more reliable than RAID5. Higher RAID number doesn't automaticlly mean more reliable.

RAID10 is more reliable than RAID50 for example.

The big problems with RAID5 vs RAID1 mirroring are write performance, time to rebuild and array performance whilst degraded.

Yes, it "wastes" more space than RAID5 and other RAID levels. But disk capacity is cheap. Speed is not.


edit:
I am an enterprise storage administrator...