Lacie or Western Digital?

[mfacey]

I'm looking into getting a 750GB external disk with Time Machine coming soon.
I've narrowed down the choice to the Lacie Quadra 750GB and the Western Digitial MyBook Pro 750GB. Both offer FW800. The Lacie is about 10% more expensive than the WD but also offers a 2 year warranty as opposed to the 1 year of the WD.

What should I get? The one thing that bothers me with the Lacie is that you don't know what disk you're getting. I've had a Lacie Porsche for about 3 years now with works great still, so no bad experiences (yet).

Any experience with respect to noise levels and reliability on either drives?

 

[ivi7]

I have used another Western Digital drive and have had no problems with it. They arent very noisy. I find them reliable and I would reccomend Western Digital to you.

 

[CortexRock]

Why not go for the new Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition? Comes with a five year warranty when bought retail... which is way in advance of anything offered by other external drive manufacturers.

Available as 320GB, 500GB, 750GB or 1TB capacity.

Link to WD Warranty information.

I'm not working for WD btw - I have the previous MyBook Pro 500GB and have had no problems with it in over a year.

 

[aLoC]

I bought the Quadra 500GB. It came with a Toshiba drive inside which is listed (along with WD) as one of the two quietest 500GB drives by Silent PC Review.

That surprised me because I was expecting some el-cheapo drive to be in there. Overall the unit is not silent though, the LaCie case does not do a very good job of supressing noise, and also there is a little fan in there.

Also vibrations travel through the case and out the metal foot quite easily. If you put your hand beside it on the desk you can feel the vibrations being transmitted to the desk. You need something to sit it on such as an old mouse pad. Overall it is not super-noisy but it is noiser than my 24" iMac.

 

[Veritas&Equitas]

I love my 500gb WD MyBook Pro. Triple interface, sexy looking like my MBP. Speeds are great, pretty quiet, not too hot. Only downside is that when it hasn't been used for awhile (while connected), it takes a few seconds to effectively "turn on" or rev up. This downside doesn't prevent it from being a great drive though

In my experiences, I've found Lacie drives to be the least reliable (had 3 fail in the past 1.5 years), hence I'm not happy with Lacie. The WD has been purring along for 8 months perfectly.