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More Reliable: Lacie Rugged vs SSD?

B

bms259

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 20, 2008
55
1
I use a MBPr and an external hard drive for photo editing (in Adobe Lightroom). The external drive is my "working drive" where I keep all the photos I'm working on.

Problem is, my drive died last night. It was a a 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT (a 7200rpm hybrid drive) in an Owen Digital Mini Pro enclosure.

I'm looking to replace it with either a Lacie Rugged Mini 500 GB 7200rpm drive, or get a SSD drive to use in an enclosure, (either the one I have, or a better one).

A third option would be a G-Drive mobile (1 TB 7200), and a final option is a 1 TB HGST 7200 drive to put in an enclosure (it's the cheapest option).

I'm not sure which will be more reliable. The Lacie Rugged has a good reputation, but SSDs don't have the moving parts to fail....but I'm not sure I really trust external enclosures. I've lost a few hard drives, all laptop drives in external enclosures.

What do you suggest?
 
SSDs are more reliable, especially if you drop them, but are more money than rotational drives. Today, for capacities up to ~1TB, there is no reason to buy rotational unless you want to compromise to save a few bucks. 500GB SSDs, like the Samsung Evos, are ~$250 now days.

The chip set in USB3 enclosures have a tendency to run hot, especially the more portable ones.

A TB enclosure will be more reliable, and give you trim command support as well as being a more friendly protocol for drives.
 
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That hybrid drive will outperform most rotational drives. If you want speed, hybrids come pretty darn close to SSDs.

The only reasons to get a rotational drive are price and capacity. If price is not a factor, you can get an SSD of similar capacity to your old hybrid.

While I agree USB3 chipsets still run on the warmer side, they are not hot enough to cause any damage. The thing to really consider is if you plan on really hammering this drive, the TB enclosure is the better bet.

As far as rugged goes, it's SSD. It has zero moving parts, whereas rotational and hybrid drives have fragile parts moving at high speeds with minuscule tolerances.
 
I don't think I'll ever buy a hybrid drive again. I've lost four drives in the past year or so, and two of them were hybrid drives. So I have some trust issues.

Another part ofky trust issue is that all those drives were laptop drives that I had put into third party enclosures.

So SSD is obviously more reliable, and though the cost pushes my budget a bit, it's still doable for 500 GB.

I'll use the drive to store RAW photos to work in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I don't know if dumping a lot of photos and editing them qualified as hammering the drive or not. I'll import anywhere from 100 to 1200 images about once a week.

If I get an SSD, what enclosure should I use? I have found any portable Thunderbolt enclosures that are affordable, and I don't know what makes a good USB 3.0 enclosure. I have an Owen Digital Mini Pro (which was housing the last drive when it croaked, after dropping about a foot onto a couch). And I have a OWC plastic enclosure.

I carry the drive with me just about everywhere in my briefcase.
Thanks for the help! I appreciate it.
 
hybrid drives are just as vulnerable as a common HDD. At the core are analog motors, moving read/write heads, spindle bearings...etc. The only two good things about HDDs are large capacity (i.e. up to at least 6TB per unit) and cost (lower per storage byte than a SSD).

If you use HDDs, make dang sure you have at least one backup....of not two backups for when the main HHDs die. Consider RAID 1 for high availability of the data libraries....and a backup of the entire file system on another drive set.
 
MCAsan said:
hybrid drives are just as vulnerable as a common HDD. At the core are analog motors, moving read/write heads, spindle bearings...etc. The only two good things about HDDs are large capacity (i.e. up to at least 6TB per unit) and cost (lower per storage byte than a SSD).

If you use HDDs, make dang sure you have at least one backup....of not two backups for when the main HHDs die. Consider RAID 1 for high availability of the data libraries....and a backup of the entire file system on another drive set.
Click to expand...

I keep a clone of the working drive, plus two time machines of the internal and external drives, in two different locations.
 
Are you asking which one of those two enclosures to use, or are you wanting to buy another? If another, you want one that supports USAP and has a SATA III (6gbps) internal interface with the drive.

I use a StarTech (S2510BPU33) enclosure.
 
ColdCase said:
Are you asking which one of those two enclosures to use, or are you wanting to buy another? If another, you want one that supports USAP and has a SATA III (6gbps) internal interface with the drive.

I use a StarTech (S2510BPU33) enclosure.
Click to expand...

If one of the enclosure I have will work well and hold up well to use and travel, then I'll just go with what I have, but if there are better ones (particularly for traveling), I could buy another.
 
MCAsan said:
Excellent idea!
Click to expand...

I'm also going to start using a second clone of the working drive too. When my working drive failed, the first thing I did was commandeer another drive to become a clone.

So what I'll have (once I get all set up) is a 500 GB working drive + a 1 TB partitioned drive with a clone and some archived reject images that will travel with me in my briefcase most of the time. Then I'll keep a second clone of the working drive either at my office or at home, in addition to the separate Time Machine drives.

I just need to decide what will be my new working drive...
 
The wife and I have rMBP with 1TB SSD. We make sure we have at least 500GB empty to allow for raw file collection during photo trips. We import via LR to a folder of the SSD. In the evenings will we do a quick cull and edit. We attach a 1TB SSD in an external enclosure for TM backups during the field trips. We don't want spinning HDDs on the road with us. If we were carrying HDDs, they would be Passports in RAID 1 mode.

When we get home we complete the culling and editing in LR. We then use LR to move the complete images from the internal SSD to the external library which which is a RAID 1 set. Both the SSD and external library RAID set are backed up by TM to separate drives.
 
MCAsan said:
The wife and I have rMBP with 1TB SSD. We make sure we have at least 500GB empty to allow for raw file collection during photo trips. We import via LR to a folder of the SSD. In the evenings will we do a quick cull and edit. We attach a 1TB SSD in an external enclosure for TM backups during the field trips. We don't want spinning HDDs on the road with us. If we were carrying HDDs, they would be Passports in RAID 1 mode.

When we get home we complete the culling and editing in LR. We then use LR to move the complete images from the internal SSD to the external library which which is a RAID 1 set. Both the SSD and external library RAID set are backed up by TM to separate drives.
Click to expand...

I don't have enough space on the internal SSD work on photos there -- plus keeping a working drive with all my photos keeps organization simpler for me, which I like a lot.

What enclosure do you use for the external SSD?
 
Hybrid drives work by keeping your most used files on the SSD component drive for speed, and the rest on the HDD component drive for mass storage. This makes good sense for a boot drive that you also store things like documents, music, and other standard fare on... but I don't see the point of using a hybrid external drive for most things. If you are like me, you use external drives for computer backups, video editing on large projects, and for backing up old footage. None of these lend themselves well to a hybrid HDD, because there is unlikely to be one segment of the drive that you use substantially more than the rest, or if so, that you want that part to be much faster than the rest. For external drives, I'd choose a RAID-0 of 7200rpm drives over an external hybrid drive... unless it needs to be portable, in which case I'd go with an external 1TB SSD (which is something I'm looking at getting now).
 
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