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Best Firewire Desktop Hard Drive

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powerhouse7

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 21, 2009
132
0
Canberra, Australia
I've just ordered a La Cie d2 Quadra 1TB hard drive. The reason I got this drive particularly was because of its supported Firewire 800 interface.
Was this the right choice? Or is there a better (reliability, price, features, design) Firewire 800 compatable hard drive I should get instead (I can easiliy cancel the order and get something else).
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks :apple:
 
Honestly, LaCie is probably the last company that I would buy an external hard drive from. My college bought 50 external hard drives from LaCie, so far 30 of them have failed and several of the replacements have failed. Everyone is going to have a different experience as far as hard drives go, however. There are probably many who have used LaCies for years without trouble, but I've seen many fail within the last two years.

I would go with either Western Digital or Seagate.
 
Yeah, I was considering that one before I ordered the La Cie but decided against it because its a got a lot of bad reviews (on the Apple Store and around the internet). It seems the La Cie is the best of the worst! It seems if you want quality Hard Drives with FireWire Support you have to get a 2 or 4 TB professional model (like the WD My Studio II HD).
 
powerhouse7 said:
What's G-Tech like?
Click to expand...
G-Tech drives are pretty high end. I've read lots of good things about them and was quite impressed with the build quality. They had a nice booth at MW in 09 that I got to check out most of their line at. If you don't mind paying a premium for HD space, they seem like the way to go. Also sport FW800 ports which is pretty nice. The only thing that worried me was their use of Hitachi drives. Had bad experience with the Hitachi Deskstar/Deathstar drives some time ago. But the drives made now are probably much better.
 
Consider building your own.

There are a few very nice FW800 enclosures out there. Three vendors that come to mind are OWC, Macally, and Oyen Digital.

Then choose a drive, and with just some very simple assembly, you're done.

A huge benefit of this path is that you can change the drive whenever you want to.
 
If I built my own though, I wouldn't get any warranty would I?

I like the look of the G-tech drives though (however it does worry me a little about the use of a hitachi HD, still looks like the best option though). But I live in Australia, and its proving almost impossible to get one over here. Amazon won't ship it, the Australian Apple Store doesn't sell it, and the "international resellers" that are on the G-Tech website aren't any help. :mad:
 
If the Australian warranties are anything like the US ones, you would be fine. The drive itself would have its own 3 or 5 year warranty, and the enclosure would have something from its manufacturer -- probably not 3 years, though.

Anyway, you would be covered for each component.
 
LaCie only really builds the enclosure that contains an industry standard hard drive made by companies like Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

I have a LaCie D2 120GB firewire only hard drive that I purchased in 2003, it's turned on for at least 8-12 hours every day and I use it to do my daily clone, every day. No complaints, no problems.

Back in the day (late 90s early 2000s) LaCie was considered a premium brand and was highly regarded by the Mac community and had a great reputation. At the time I purchased mine, Seagate had one external model and Western Digital hadn't entered the market yet for external hard drives. Most external hard drives were made by 3rd party companies like LaCie or were DIY enclosure kits.

Sometime after I bought my LaCie, maybe around 2005, LaCie started having failures with their drives. In many cases it turned out not to be the actual hard drive in the LaCie unit, but the external power supply. Some people got LaCie to replace the power supply under warranty or purchased a new power supply to only have it also fail. As of late, mostly because of this LaCie has acquired a bad reputation. However I don't think that the hard drives used in the units are any more prone to failure than those same drives made by the company (WD, Seagate, etc.) that supplied the hard drive to LaCie.

HTH.
 
Folks, don't worry about the Hitachi drives, Apple, OWC and G-Tech all use Hitachi drives, their high end drives are some of the best money can buy. The low end ones are crap, as are most low end drives. Personally I like the OWC and G-Tech drives. I've yet to have one die after years of use. I've lost my WD drive "death click" My Seagate has had to be reformatted several times due to corrupt data. I stay away from the big guys personally. :apple: :D
 
brijar said:
Folks, don't worry about the Hitachi drives, Apple, OWC and G-Tech all use Hitachi drives, their high end drives are some of the best money can buy. The low end ones are crap, as are most low end drives. Personally I like the OWC and G-Tech drives. I've yet to have one die after years of use. I've lost my WD drive "death click" My Seagate has had to be reformatted several times due to corrupt data. I stay away from the big guys personally. :apple: :D
Click to expand...

This post is something good for me to read, as I recently upgraded my MBP drive to a Hitachi. I had to apply hdapm to it, to stop the clicking, but other than that, it is great. I caught the clicking about 2 hours after installing the drive, so the wear it has caused to the drive is a non-issue. The only reason it was clicking is because it was reacting adversely with OSX's power saving feature.
 
I agree with those suggesting to put together your own hard drive and enclosure. Typically, internal hard drives have 3 or 5 year warranties and externals only have 1 year warranties, so building your own can result in a longer warranty for the drive itself.
 
Depending on ur price range... If you are looking to stay under 200... Get the MyBook 2TB external Studio LX FW800 drive for mac. Its amazing.
 
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