Maxtor Onetouch III 600GB or 1TB?

[budugu]

I am planning on getting one of those monsters. Does anybody have any experience with those drives? with less than 6lbs (5.8) they seem to be far better for portability than the lacie equivalents 12lbs! I have read a lot of reviews that lacie's highend storage is very faulty. I am planning to use it with my imac G5 (not interested in pain of changing the hard disk) more over the add says that it will be able to sync more than one computer that would be a real boon!

price per GB for both 600 GB or 1 TB seems to be same at 0.77$. Which one should i buy?

http://www.maxtoronetouchiii.com/ot3_turbo.html

[twoodcc]

i'm not seeing the specs or price on that website

[budugu]

Originally Posted by twoodcc

i'm not seeing the specs or price on that website

1Tb is 770 ; 600GB is 470$ at Newegg. just search for maxtor 1TB at newegg. i could not find the specs any where else. thanks!

[twoodcc]

Originally Posted by budugu

1Tb is 770 ; 600GB is 470$ at Newegg. just search for maxtor 1TB at newegg. i could not find the specs any where else. thanks!

oh ok, i just thought it would be on your link. sorry

the 1Tb would be nice, but do you have that kind of money?

[Revlimit Punk]

If you can afford it without compromising on other upgrades, i'd say go for the 1TB model.
Rule #4375623 of hard drives: space is never enough.

[Revlimit Punk]

Ah and don't forget rule #4375622 either... Make it possible to keep a backup copy of all your data in case your primary storage device fails. 1TB is a large amount of data and backing it up on DVDs will be a lot of pain. If you have not yet considered the fact of having a backup copy of the content, i would suggest investing in a couple of 500GB drives instead of one 1TB drive and schedule an automatic carbon copy of the first drive on the second drive once a week.

At first it might feel like you've tossed money out of the window, but you won't be spending money for DVD media backups for a while and with scheduled backups it's just a lot less of an hassle to keep the backup copy up to date. (not to talk about the bonus of booting from the backup drive right off in case the main one fails).

(sorry about the double post, i have yet to get a feel about posting on a forum, i have to change my habits compared to instant messaging, and sometimes i forget about that)

[edesignuk]

1TB is going to be near impossible to backup in a home environment, which is why I'd look towards an enclosure that can hold 4x250GB drives in a RAID5 array, giving you 750GB usable storage. That's what I'd do.

[Revlimit Punk]

Originally Posted by edesignuk

1TB is going to be near impossible to backup in a home environment, which is why I'd look towards an enclosure that can hold 4x250GB drives in a RAID5 array, giving you 750GB usable storage. That's what I'd do.

Since i might be going to upgrade my storage too, i am quite interested in such a solution... how much would it cost (roughly) to get an enclosure with 4 sata bays and hardware raid 5?

[budugu]

Originally Posted by edesignuk

1TB is going to be near impossible to backup in a home environment, which is why I'd look towards an enclosure that can hold 4x250GB drives in a RAID5 array, giving you 750GB usable storage. That's what I'd do.

I think you can configure them for RAID 0/1. So that they automatically can keep another copy. but i guess 770 for 500GB (Raid 1) seems less interesting!

[Revlimit Punk]

Originally Posted by budugu

I think you can configure them for RAID 0/1. So that they automatically can keep another copy. but i guess 770 for 500GB (Raid 1) seems less interesting!

If you can afford it, i think it's a pretty cool solution. I would be still waiting for a price estimation from edesignuk though, the raid 5 solution looks sweet too...

[edesignuk]

Google "Buffalo TeraStation", 1TB (750GB if you RAID5 it), RAID, NAS.

[budugu]

Originally Posted by Revlimit Punk

If you can afford it, i think it's a pretty cool solution. I would be still waiting for a price estimation from edesignuk though, the raid 5 solution looks sweet too...

You can get 250x4 disks for about 400$+ but the killer is the raid dsik array which itself if more than a thousand bucks! But this is *the* portable solution that i found. It is streaching my budget too but i am hating to keep multiple external hards etc all around my table and not knowing what is on which disk.

[Revlimit Punk]

Originally Posted by edesignuk

Google "Buffalo TeraStation", 1TB (750GB if you RAID5 it), RAID, NAS.

I love the design. Price looks high (800-900$) but compared to the 500GB raid 1 offer for 700~ dollars it looks good.
I saw the product description, though, and i didn't find any firewire 800 (nor firewire 400) ports... price aside, this would keep me away from buying it.

[Revlimit Punk]

Originally Posted by budugu

You can get 250x4 disks for about 400$+ but the killer is the raid dsik array which itself if more than a thousand bucks! But this is *the* portable solution that i found. It is streaching my budget too but i am hating to keep multiple external hards etc all around my table and not knowing what is on which disk.

I agree with you. The maxtor offer looks good. Again, if you can afford it without compromising on other features/upgrades of your iMac, i'd say go for the 1TB version.

[bloosqr]

Originally Posted by budugu

You can get 250x4 disks for about 400$+ but the killer is the raid dsik array which itself if more than a thousand bucks! But this is *the* portable solution that i found. It is streaching my budget too but i am hating to keep multiple external hards etc all around my table and not knowing what is on which disk.

Take a look at the ReadyNAS_X6 its about $500.

http://www.infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS_X6.htm

You can pop in what ever drives you want even different size drives and it auto-upgrades, it does raid 0,1,5. So you spend about $900 to get a terabyte of hard drive space raid_0 or 750 gigs of space at raid 1.


I think the price point for drives is now the 320 gigs which are about $120 or so. So you could get about 1.3 terabytes of space for $980 at raid 0 or 900 gigs of space for $920. The other nice thing about that box is if you dont have the money you can just buy the box and use two drives for mirroring and wait to put in the other drives later.

(i.e. put in two 500 gigs now mirrored, and then the 500's drop in price put 2 more).

The NAS supports apple file share, samba, and nfs which is awesome.

You can do this cheaper than the ready_nas, but the only way to do it cheaper is to buy a really cheap midtower computer w/ 4 drive slots and controller for about $300 or so, install linux on it and use that as a file server. My roommate has gone this route, it works as well but its got to be something you are comfortable with.

[twoodcc]

Originally Posted by bloosqr

Take a look at the ReadyNAS_X6 its about $500.

http://www.infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS_X6.htm

You can pop in what ever drives you want even different size drives and it auto-upgrades, it does raid 0,1,5. So you spend about $900 to get a terabyte of hard drive space raid_0 or 750 gigs of space at raid 1.


I think the price point for drives is now the 320 gigs which are about $120 or so. So you could get about 1.3 terabytes of space for $980 at raid 0 or 900 gigs of space for $920. The other nice thing about that box is if you dont have the money you can just buy the box and use two drives for mirroring and wait to put in the other drives later.

(i.e. put in two 500 gigs now mirrored, and then the 500's drop in price put 2 more).

The NAS supports apple file share, samba, and nfs which is awesome.

You can do this cheaper than the ready_nas, but the only way to do it cheaper is to buy a really cheap midtower computer w/ 4 drive slots and controller for about $300 or so, install linux on it and use that as a file server. My roommate has gone this route, it works as well but its got to be something you are comfortable with.

where can you buy that?

[bloosqr]

Originally Posted by twoodcc

where can you buy that?

I was a bit off on the price..

Excaliber PC has it for $570

http://www.excaliberpc.com/Infrant_T...id-559765.html

the other one : the readynas 600 (which is the same thing but less of a auto-configure mode but has the additional feature of hotspare) is

http://www.computerhq.com/Infrant_Re...id-565831.html

$557 here

[budugu]

The warranty seems to be only for 1 year! I probably will end up buying the 600GB version for now! then i can get 1GB RAM for imac and the ilugger II case for another 100 bucks!