Need help selecting external hard drive....Please!

[Anonymouslives]

I can't seem to locate anything that seems to have a great overall rating or review. Everything I keep coming across on the web has too many bad reviews along with it. I need something about 500GB and between 100-300 dollars. What would you guys recommend and why?

 

[Boneoh]

A little more expensive

I bought a LaCie 2Big Triple about a year ago and I love it. It has 2 x 1Tb drives with firewire 800, firewire 400, and USB connections. I run this as a RAID array. I use this for Time Machine, my digital photography, and iTunes library. Also I copy my Parallels images for backups of my Windows virtual machines. This is going for less than $400.

Good luck!

Pete

 

[Eanair]

When I was shopping around for an external HD, my uncle recommended Maxtor, but I got a myBook because I found it on sale for over 50% off when Circuit City was going out of business.

My experience with myBook was not so great, but then again, it may have been because I was trying to run my iTunes library off it, and I have a LOT of music. Perhaps it would have been much better if I only used it to store documents/photos instead of trying to have it on all the time when trying to play music. Who knows. 🙂

Anyways, that's my 2 cents; hope it helps!

Good luck!

 

[PuckDaddy]

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEAQ7H1TE32M/

looked everywhere I can think to look
keep going back to OWC
i just do not feel comfortable about buying Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor retail machines without buying 2 (which isn't a bad idea at all). the biggest reason is not knowing what's in the enclosures.

read so many comments that a unit was not functioning, then they'd pull the drive out of the enclosure, pop it into a quality enclosure (OWC's name pops up quite a bit) or perhaps just a dock LIKE THIS ONE and it work just fine

I've priced separate drives and enclosures, and I just can't come up with any better deal than the Mercury AL drives in the first link
the drive in that unit (you can pick from many, I chose the one with the Hitachi E7k1000 drive which is the "enterprise class" version of the popular Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B "Saturn".
the drive alone costs $160
the 7k1000.B is a little cheaper, but the "E"7k1000 has a larger buffer and a "targeted 1.2 million hours MTBF"

while for some, grabbing a 500gb drive for $60 from newegg seems quick and easy, it will probably be met with some frustration down the line (this is a situation where I would grab 2 and clone them)

if you are particularly concerned about what you're storing, you might want to look at different RAID arrays for mirroring (raid1)

the biggest complaints are what some believe to be drive failure, when it's simply the enclosure .... so a good quality enclosure with a good (oxford) chipset is what good money is spent on, not on something sitting on the shelf at Best Buy next to 30 more just like them .... and don't get suckered into long stated warranties from WD / Seagate, lots of people report receiving refurbished drives as replacements with no data recovered.

best advice (imo) is to buy 2 drives and clone them, essentially keeping a backup of a backup