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Can we drop the "this brand is better than that brand" as it gets most people absolutely nowhere!
Most drives come with 3-5yr WARRANTY, so they can be replaced for free by the manufacturer, and more importantly RAID is not backup, so regardless of drive fails, you should have two (or more) completely separate storage units in case of catastrophic failure of the RAID itself.

This tit-for-tat debate is getting seriously boring and irrelevant. :rolleyes:


but but but...where are we going to post all the irrelevant links to stories about hard drives??? :eek:

You're exactly right though.
 
I consider Lacie to be the highest quality of product, and Seagate to be one of the lowest, so that's a weird mixture.

I don't. I had five Lacie hardrives and they all went down within one year. I stepped over to Western Digital and never even experienced any issues for years since. But for serious backup I rely on my Qnap TS-1079 Pro
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8 x 2TB drives enough for a small business that I'm running (all from western digital). Not that fast tough as this Lacy but serves it purposes; storing. This devices works like a charm.
 
And this article starts by saying that its results are not representative.

It certainly is representative of my experience with Seagate drives. There are people who will selectively filter data to suit their agendas and personal buying preferences. But even if you asumme all the comments about Seagates failing are anecdotal, it's a LOT of anecdotal expereince.

But it's all good, you go ahead and keeping buying your Seagate drives, and I'll keep avoiding them. Best of luck!
 
It certainly is representative of my experience with Seagate drives. There are people who will selectively filter data to suit their agendas and personal buying preferences. But even if you asumme all the comments about Seagates failing are anecdotal, it's a LOT of anecdotal expereince.

But it's all good, you go ahead and keeping buying your Seagate drives, and I'll keep avoiding them. Best of luck!

Hard drives that failed on me:

- The IBM Deathstar (quickly)
- A Samsung (from before Seagate, after several years)
- A Western Digital Black 1TB

HGST, Seagate, Fujitsu and Toshiba not yet (Fujitsu and Toshiba may come with a laptop and I just replace them by something bigger and faster immediately)
 
Wrong!

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

I'm a sysadmin too, and ever since Seagate HDD capacities hit 2TB and up, the failure rates on them have been exponentially higher than the competition. Even with my small NAS at home, I've had to send back 2 Seagates already while I have 6 Hitachi Travelstar drives of the same capacity and speed, all running error free.


Well, as an admin. I can say the brand is not the factor that determines reliability. We have Seagate, WD and Hitachi deployed in various configurations. They all have similar failure rate.

It's a game of luck, whether you got your drive from a defective batch.

We have zero complaints for all 3 brands, they all have great customer services and replacement policies.
 
My anecdotal 2 cents: my entire meticulously ripped, tagged, and playlisted 120,000 track music collection wiped out by a Seagate 4TB drive failure in a Thunderbolt adapter daisy chained with a display and 2 other drives. Replaced it with an identical backup drive and 2 days later it failed as well, leaving me screwed out of 5 years of work. Both Seagate Recovery and Encase Recovery said the heads crashed into the platter leaving only unrecoverable dust behind. Just seeing the Seagate logo now triggers post-traumatic stress seizures in my brain.
 
True, but you're unlikely to see one given the past history of storage.
So the way most deal with this now, is to buy an OPTICAL Thunderbolt cable. While they come in lengths of up to 100m (330ft) which are very expensive, you can still mitigate the problem using a more affordable 10m one and putting the storage in a cupboard or suchlike. If you're buying a reasonably high-priced (self-powered – as optical cables don't carry power like the shorter copper ones) storage device or two (or more), then the cost of such a cable while not cheap isn't too bad, as it solves the problem and you can then buy whatever storage unit you want.

I did this with 2x Pegasus R6's & an 8TB WD Thunderbolt, using a $300 "Optical Cable by Corning" (the cable is future-proofed as they work with TBolt 1 & 2 as well!) and then just daisy-chaining using cheap copper Tbolt ones:
http://www.corning.com/CableSystems/OpticalCablesbyCorning/products/thunderbolt.aspx

UK peeps: these are not distributed in the UK until August 2014, but I have seen them on Ebay for £500 (yep, pricey, but worth it if needed).

That sounds like a very expensive and tedious solutions to a problem that shouldn´t exist. Im sure if Apple would make an external HDD, it would be completely silent, since they actually care about the details. Like the Time capsule, it has a hdd, but you can barely hear it, or the mac mini....It´s quite tragic, Lacie is suppose to be a quality brand. I wish apple would make an external Premium external HDD in the spirit of the Mac Pro. But I guess you are right, its just wishful thinking for now.

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I don't. I had five Lacie hardrives and they all went down within one year. I stepped over to Western Digital and never even experienced any issues for years since. But for serious backup I rely on my Qnap TS-1079 Pro Image

8 x 2TB drives enough for a small business that I'm running (all from western digital). Not that fast tough as this Lacy but serves it purposes; storing. This devices works like a charm.

You are right, Lacie isnt as good as it seems and their service is horrible. THeir harddrives are (most of them) suppose to stand on their feet. Some of them are really thin, so a tiny bump and they fall over. that happened to me and it was instantly broken. And Lacie refused to give me a refund. I would understand if the HDD would fall from the table, but just tipping over, then they should make harddrives that doesn´t fall that easy if they don´t want to pay for the repair.
 
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

I'm a sysadmin too, and ever since Seagate HDD capacities hit 2TB and up, the failure rates on them have been exponentially higher than the competition. Even with my small NAS at home, I've had to send back 2 Seagates already while I have 6 Hitachi Travelstar drives of the same capacity and speed, all running error free.

I don't question you experience, but let's stop quoting that article.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/
 
I had 8 Seagate 1.5TB drives going 24x7 for 3 years with no issues (these were supposed to be the ones with all the issues) and have had 6 Seagate 3TB drives going for almost a year and a half with no issues....

Does that mean Seagate is foolproof or better than the rest? No it just goes to show that consumer drives are hit or miss when it comes to longevity. All of mine have been in external cases with heavy cooling. Maybe that makes a difference? No idea.

Maybe I'm just lucky and this is purely anecdotal!

Edit: oh yeah and those 1.5TB drives were given to family members and all are still running as far as I know....
 
Seagate = automatic no sale.

Can't trust that much data to be lost to Seagate.

There would be a change in connections (whatever comes after USB 3.1, TB v.2) before I could fill up 25TB of space. How would you even back that up?
 
That sounds like a very expensive and tedious solutions to a problem that shouldn´t exist. Im sure if Apple would make an external HDD, it would be completely silent, since they actually care about the details. Like the Time capsule, it has a hdd, but you can barely hear it, or the mac mini....It´s quite tragic, Lacie is suppose to be a quality brand. I wish apple would make an external Premium external HDD in the spirit of the Mac Pro. But I guess you are right, its just wishful thinking for now.

Why is it an expensive and tedious solution to a problem that shouldn't exist? The cable is not in wall, so is as easy as plugging it in. What do you think happens in companies that have in-house storage, or even the plethora of datacentres across the globe, for that matter. They all keep their storage in separate places away from the workers area for this very reason.
If using optical cables works for me and other users, then it can work for anyone else. If you do your planning properly, you should cost-in the true cost of your storage to include the cable needed to satisfy your needs, as everyone should do.

Sure it'd be nice to have quiet storage units available, but the kinds of users who need Thunderbolt (pros and certain enterprise) would rather not pay extra for quiet storage ON EACH AND EVERY piece of storage they require at much greater cost on each, when they can store it away using cost-effective cabling instead. Hence why it's almost always never done that way.
 
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I'm sure if Apple would make an external HDD, it would be completely silent, since they actually care about the details.

In the 90's Apple did produce an external SCSI HDD, however, instead of selling it themselves, they sold the manufacturing and selling rights to LaCie.

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Quiet? It's a subjective thing. It had a fan on the back, and you could hear the ticking sound when the heads were seeking.

And even earlier, Apple made an HDD in a different form factor; again with a fan.

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These too made noise.

What the OP is asking for is possible; just the market isn't willing to pay for such a product. For example, most do not know that IO Safe makes a few different HDD models that are encased in a fireproof casing. Very silent, very expensive, and not very good looking.
 

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In the 90's Apple did produce an external SCSI HDD, however, instead of selling it themselves, they sold the manufacturing and selling rights to LaCie.

Image

Quiet? It's a subjective thing. It had a fan on the back, and you could hear the ticking sound when the heads were seeking.

And even earlier, Apple made an HDD in a different form factor; again with a fan.

Image

These too made noise.

What the OP is asking for is possible; just the market isn't willing to pay for such a product. For example, most do not know that IO Safe makes a few different HDD models that are encased in a fireproof casing. Very silent, very expensive, and not very good looking.

Exactly, nice info. I rest my case, above.
 
I need one of these but the price is still too high.

I now have 15TB of external storage thanks to 7 different USB drives.
 
I like....

LaCie. I like 5 TB disks. I like Thunderbolt.....:D

I dont like the combo of LaCie and Seagate. Too many discussions about reliability and disk failures. And then, price.....:confused:....:eek:


:):apple:
 
Spoke to a few Apple reps, presently only G-Tech and Pegasus2 will support Thunderbolt 2 (for the nMP). A number "hinted" to avoiding LaCie (no surprise).

G-tech has not announced any Thunderbolt2 products, and just started shipping their Thunderbolt 1 G-Drive Pro which was announced almost a year ago at NAB.

LaCie demonstrated at CES with nMP Thunderbolt2 product using PCIe based SSD like what is used within the nMP; early review by Anandtech showed performance exceeding 1.2GB/sec thruput. Pegasus2 can't do that. Several other blogs and forums discussed this, including MacRumors.

As for Apple, online and retail stores sell both G-tech, LaCie and Seagate products. The Apple store stats indicate LaCie selling more than G-Tech if you sort on top sellers. Why is Apple stocking all 3 brands? Oops, there are some WD also at my local Apple store, too.

Perhaps you or your Apple contacts were mistaken, or misinformed.
 
Just wondering with 5TB HDDs coming into production does this mean 1-2-3-4 TB ones will see a price reduction?
 
Wishful thinking.

Perhaps it will happen, but they will probably take a long time to get there.

Did some checking and WD is planing to release a 6TB drive in the next few months so the 'small' drives will com down in place soon... well by next Christmas LOL
 
For those of you have this or something similar, how do you backup this much data?
 
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