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External Hard Drives

Thanks "Bengt77" for the quick response.

Is this FAT32 a reliable format? I saw somewhere that there is a format which has a frequent file loss, even if the drive is not properly disconnected. I'm not sure of its name, but just wanted to check....
 
As a file system on which to run an OS it's not very reliable, that's true. That's why all recent Microsoft operating systems run on NTFS. But as a file system for mere storage it's perfectly fine. (Be sure to back up often, though. Not because FAT32 is unreliable, but because you should, regardless.)
 
Here's a short review I did on my experience with a WD MyBook Studio Edition II:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=8901298#post8901298

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you are looking for or not.

But here are some of the things that mattered to me when I was searching for a hard drive.

Is it a NAS or DAS (Network attached or Direct attached)? Although it sounds like you are mostly interested in direct attached storage for your guide.
External Interfaces: USB, FW 400/800, eSata.
RAID Capabilities: 0, 1, 5, JBod, etc. (won't list them all here).
Is it bus powered, or does it need to be plugged in?
Noise level (can it be used in a living environment).
Does it spin down (sleep) when instructed to by OS/X?
Transfer Speeds (in actual use)
Listed speed / ram cache (e.g. 7200RPM / 256MB cache)
How long have you owned it, and what do you use it for?
Failures people have had with them
Any experiences with customer service with the company.

A guide that covers these in spreadsheet form would be really cool. I haven't followed all the links yet, but I certainly appreciate your efforts!

jalyst said:
If you mean read from NTFS and write it to HSF+, yes this is possible.
If you install MacFUSE + NTFS-3G you can also write quite well to NTFS.
Click to expand...

Has MacFUSE updated to 64 bit drivers? I do agree that it works great under a 32 bit kernel, but last I checked (and it was a few months ago) 64 bit kernel drivers hadn't been released yet.
 
WD & Seagate

i have a WD My Book 500gb fw400 and it failed once, fixed it through some pseudo commands. it sucks. it will not sleep. every time i shut down that imac, the drive randomly lights and spins up, causing me to have to turn it off every time i shut down. another fault- when i restart into windows (codmw2 ftw) i have to eject and unplug it or else windows won't boot.

i also have a seagate 1.5tb fw800. it is godly.

Edit: here are the amazon links.

WD: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1260248765&sr=1-1

Seagate: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeA...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1260248787&sr=8-1
 
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I apologize for not being able to update as quick as I can, I'm slowly getting through the thread, albeit - very slowly. One request would be the Amazon link, it also helps me know better what versions of the drive you have. DoFoT9, Perrumpo & Bengt77 have the format done great.

Thanks to all. Feel free to edit the guide on your own, just mark your changes please and attempt to follow the format.

I am through Post #27. Hope the guide is helping.
 
I'm still on Tiger on my main workstation but that does sound intriguing.
I do have another brand new mac mini 2009 so I'll investigate this...

dernhelm said:
Has MacFUSE updated to 64 bit drivers? I do agree that it works great under a 32 bit kernel, but last I checked (and it was a few months ago) 64 bit kernel drivers hadn't been released yet.
Click to expand...
 
I just ordered an Icy Dock (what a name) removable FW800 enclosure. It looks like a dedicated enclosure, but is hot swappable with no screws or trays. Why keep buying enclosures, when all you need is a new drive?

I currently have a WD Firewire 400 mybook, but have trouble keeping it mounted.
 
I just had my third Western Digital My Book Studio die on me. Never again. I have had nothing but trouble with them losing connection over FW 800 and failing to mount. This one did that for a few weeks and then just up and died. I only use FW800 capable external drives and I do incremental clones every night as well as Time Machine to the same drive. I also boot from the external to run Disk Warrior and repair permissions on a regular basis. Anyway I replaced this latest piece of junk from WD with a Rocstor drive which has very good reviews. I would also buy an OWC drive. La Cie and G Skill are better than the mainstream drives like Seagate and WD but not as reliable as RocStor and OWC seem to be.
 
Never heard of Rocstor, might look into it...

*update*
Looks as though most stuff they sell is a rebadged something or other....
I recognise a lot of the enclosures as ones originally made by other OEM's, not that that's uncommon.
Have a look through all the OEM's sites here and you'll see what I mean (13th post down).

Their best 3.5" single-drive enclosure has the same specs/design as Sarotech's fhd-354ufsb, that's one of my finalists in the thread above.
I was excited for a minute as I was hoping they'd have a newer OXF bridge-chip than Sarotech's model, but it's still 1.5Gbps SATA.
I do like the red coat of paint, tis a nice 'rice-boy' touch, shame they don't offer the enclosure as a bare-bones though.

Their business model is clearly centred around selling hard disks with their enclosures for more of a margin
A lot of brands do this, including some of the big hard drive makers like WD/Seagate/Hitachi etc.
I personally am not interested in enclosures that force you to buy them with a hard disk, I want the option to BYO.

I don't see anything about g.skill making hard drive enclosures on their website, can you provide a link?
The other makes you mentioned aren't bad either, OWC is the best of the two IMO...

Cheers

DarwinOSX said:
I just had my third Western Digital My Book Studio die on me. Never again. I have had nothing but trouble with them losing connection over FW 800 and failing to mount. This one did that for a few weeks and then just up and died. I only use FW800 capable external drives and I do incremental clones every night as well as Time Machine to the same drive. I also boot from the external to run Disk Warrior and repair permissions on a regular basis. Anyway I replaced this latest piece of junk from WD with a Rocstor drive which has very good reviews. I would also buy an OWC drive. La Cie and G Skill are better than the mainstream drives like Seagate and WD but not as reliable as RocStor and OWC seem to be.
Click to expand...
 
I believe I have updated it to include everyone's post. At some point DarwinOSX it would be nice to know which Rocstor drive you purchased and if those other recommendations came from previous ownership.
 
I've got quite a few externals, ranging from 120gb up to a 1tb drives.

Frankly, I find that they're all pretty much the same. One person swears by WD, another person has nothing but bad experiences with them.

Just buy them on specs/price and make sure to have backups.
 
So for this are you looking at NAS as well?

I have a synology with some WD drives in it. Would you be interested in some info for the guide?
 
In order of purchase (all USB 2.0 except as mentioned below):

LaCie "desktop hard disk" (UPC 0 93053 73168 7) 500Gb. Purchased three of them to use with Time Machine on three Macs. Faultless performance but noisy.

Seagate FreeAgent, FreeAgent Pro. Two x 500Gb, 1 x 320Gb. (Dark enclosure with orange glow.) Had mounting issues with one connected to Airport Extreme Base Station, but seems to have improved lately - presumably with Airport/OS X updates. HOWEVER...

The Pro was connected via Firewire 400 to my Mac and was frequently refusing to wake and occasionally corrupting files - once to the point it wouldn't mount (I can recommend DiskWarrior!). On a whim, I switched it to using USB2 and have had no problems with it since (many weeks now). So my suggestion would be not to buy Firewire from Seagate.

Western Digital MyBook Mac Edition 1Tb. No problems.

Western Digital "Essentials" 1Tb. No problems.

Seagate "External desktop drive" 1Tb. (ST310005EXM101-RK) Only just got it as an offsite backup drive. Backed up 4 Macs and some other externals onto it with no problems so far.
 
Direct attached devices (i.e. block-level) are very different beasts to NAS's.
The closest NAS's get to direct attached devices is when protocols such as iSCSI and AoE are used.

If we're going to start talking about NAS's there should be a separate guide...
Or at least a separate section, with the guide being renamed etc...

Chris.L said:
So for this are you looking at NAS as well?

I have a synology with some WD drives in it. Would you be interested in some info for the guide?
Click to expand...
 
jalyst said:
Direct attached devices (i.e. block-level) are very different beasts to NAS's.
The closest NAS's get to direct attached devices is when protocols such as iSCSI and AoE are used.

If we're going to start talking about NAS's there should be a separate guide...
Or at least a separate section, with the guide being renamed etc...
Click to expand...

I know they are different. That's why I asked, most of the reviews so far are of DAS'. There is mention of Drobo, but that can be both.

However, if thegoldenmackid is only concerned about the drives in what ever solution you have got, then I will provide reviews of the HDD's rather than HDD's and NAS:)
 
I believe at inception DAS (mostly single-drive) was the original focus...
But if he's the only one doing the collating, then the course it takes is up to him.
 
Maxtor 750 GB OneTouch 4 Plus. Connected via Firewire. It serves as my Time Machine backup, my iTunes drive, my iPhoto drive as well as a cloned backup of my Mac mini and an extra partition for Windows, if/when I ever get around to installing.

Only issue I had, daughter was in iPhoto that brought the whole drive down. Disk recovered without much headache using Disk Utility. Drive came with Mac specific software, which I've pretty much ignored.

Western Digital 250 GB My Passport. A portable drive connected via USB. Backs up files on the Maxtor drive mostly. No worries.

WD provides some annoying software, which seems to turn itself back on occasionally. I'd recommend not installing in the first place.
 
I'll update later. I'm for NAS drives being included. I want to keep it towards product reviews though, not explaining how to build a hard drive, etc...
 
Iomega UltraMax 500GB
http://www.amazon.com/Iomega-33991-...?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262834073&sr=1-18 (think it's this one)
On my second one now as Apple only do replacements rather than refunds. Terrible drive. Very noisy and very slow. Connected through FireWire to my old MacBook until that one was damaged and I lost all my data - the Iomega made sure I'd definitely lost it by failing in it's role of backup drive. Replaced by Apple, now connect through USB but it's very hit-and-miss as to whether it powers up correctly and actually stores any data. I would sell it but I don't want someone else to have it, it's that bad.

Neil Poulton LaCie 500GB
http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Desktop...6?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262834125&sr=1-6
Much much much better. Quiter and quicker. Never fails, has alot of important data on and now I practically have no backup I'm relying heavily on this one.
 
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Looking for a 500gb hardrive to store videos on.

I use the smallest (as in hardrive/memory size) MacBook. I want to store footage of my choreography and dance performances on an external hard drive. I know my MacBook has FW400 and firewire. I don't think it has usb2.0. What is the cheapest and/or best hard drive I should get? WD and Seagate seem to be the main choices. I don't care about how it looks or about the warranty. I'm more concerned about which connectivity I should use (usb/firewire, etc) and good video transferring performance.
 
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