external hard drive help!!

[.mark.]

I'm not having much fun at the moment with trying to get a 1tb external hd.

I ordered a mybook studio and there is a usb/firewire conflict with my dell monitor (the usb hub/card reader) so I sent that back.

So I then ordered a lacie big disk extreme+ which got delivered today. First thing I thought was why is it so big?! I then did some research (which I probably should have done before I ordered it) and now realise its got 4 hard drives in a raid 0 config. Since I want this drive for backups it needs to be reliable - the raid 0 4 hd setup makes this drive 4 times more likely to fail than a regular HD - so I will return this drive as well.

I have looked on the apple store and found an iomega 1tb drive but then read that it is 2 hds so twice as likely to fail.

I've looked into getting an internal hard drive and an enclosure - i've found a seagate 1tb drive for £160 but now i can't find a suitable enclosure. I want it to have fw800.

Can anyone either

1. Advise me on a good, reliable 1tb external HD suitable for backups
2. or, point me in the direction of some decent external enclosures (3.5/sata/fw800)

bear in mind i'm in the uk so would rather order from a uk site

 

[Mal]

The Lacie D2 is a 1TB single drive setup, with FireWire 800 in addition to the usual FireWire 400 and USB. It's a good solid drive, shouldn't cause you any types of problems. Of course, if it's reliability you're looking for, the best scenario would be a redundant array, but your costs go up significantly there.

jW

 

[.mark.]

The Lacie D2 is a 1TB single drive setup, with FireWire 800 in addition to the usual FireWire 400 and USB. It's a good solid drive, shouldn't cause you any types of problems. Of course, if it's reliability you're looking for, the best scenario would be a redundant array, but your costs go up significantly there.

jW

thanks for the advice - i'll look into it. As far as reliability goes i don't think i need a redundant array, I just want the reliability of a normal HD - not of raid 0. I'm considering getting the WD mybook again and getting a separate usb hub and not using the one integrated into my monitor...

 

[errol]

You can always take two fw800 drives, and use apple disk utility and create a software mirrored raid with them. The FW800 drives can plug into eachother, so you wouldn't waste two fw800 ports on your mac.