Fast, quiet USB3 hard drives...

Many thanks for the info regarding the Lacie Porsche Design, I was considering to buy one...

the Back-Up plus that I have seems to be pretty quiet. not sure if its 7200rpm though, I have been looking for that stat and cant seem to find it.

The Seagate GoFlex Pro series of drives has a 7200rpm option. I have a 500gb 7200rpm GoFlex with a USB 3.0 interface (proprietary, included with my drive). It has served me well so far, used primarily for storing my audio sample library.

As an aside, I'm currently looking for USB 3.0 hubs that don't suck. Let me know if you have any experience with one. I'm back to my 2.0 one for now...

I'm using a pair of LaCie d2 Quadra v3 USB 3.0 3 TB drives on a 2012 mini (they also have FW800 daisy chaining ability). They have 64mb caches. They aren't silent but they produce less noise than other drives I've tested. They look pretty funky, never get hot and are quite fast.

Sustained read/writes of about 110 mb/s as separate drives and 190mb/s in mirrored raid 1. Later if I need more speed or space I could add another 2 for nested raid 1+0 or could even add a raid 1 pair of SSDs in external usb3 drive cases and have a big external fusion drive to go with the 1TB internal one the mini came with. Though that's probably risky.

You could put together your own setup buying external cases with whatever drives you want for less money than I paid for these but they probably wont look so cute.

madmin said:

I'm using a pair of LaCie d2 Quadra v3 USB 3.0 3 TB drives on a 2012 mini (they also have FW800 daisy chaining ability). They have 64mb caches. They aren't silent but they produce less noise than other drives I've tested. They look pretty funky, never get hot and are quite fast.

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Daddy needs some more storage, how much noise does these badboys generate?

It might be reasonable to get one LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Edition instead of two d2s.

PaulKemp said:

Daddy needs some more storage, how much noise does these badboys generate?

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I dont have anything to measure that unfortunately. I only notice noise when they awake from sleep. During normal usage I would hear them if they were on my desk but I've got them about 1m away on an open shelf and never notice anything distracting. BTW they don't sit on my MOTU that photo was just joking.

All in all I'm still very happy with them.