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Recommend a 1TB USB/FireWire 800 Powered Hard Drive

S

shootingrubber

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 7, 2009
256
0
Hello,

I am looking for a 1TB USB or FireWire 800 powered hard drive. I am looking for something reasonably cheap, but I am open to suggestions. This drive will be used mainly for storing photos (RAW files).

Specifically, I have been looking the Seagate Goflex drives and WD Passport drives. I am kind of leaning towards the Seagate, but what do you all think?

Thanks in advance
 
Consider getting a 1TB bare drive.. with a 3 to 5 year warranty. Enterprise class for reliability - photos!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145420
That's a Hitachi 1TB for $109. (costs more than non-enterprise class)

With the drives you list, typically 1 year warranty and the case controllers are questionable. So, I'd buy the drive and case separate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007705 600006254&IsNodeId=1&name=3.5"

You could get an external enclosure that has USB 3 - which is backwards compatible, and you'll be covered in the future. (Thunderbolt will have an adapter - and Intel will support USB 3 on chipset next year.) You could find an enclosure that has USB and FW 800, etc... look around. At least you have flexibility - it's nice to be able to swap out different drives at different times - something you can't do with a combo's locked case.
 
All the drives and enclosures 8CoreWhore recommends are 3.5" - desktop drives - hence, not portable nor USB/FW bus powered.

Also, as a side note, enterprise class drives IMO are not worth the 2x price difference vs security - specially on laptop/portable drives, which are exposed to much higher risks. All drives fail. It's just a matter of when. It's always better for common users to have a good backup strategy than shelling out cash for enterprise class drives. If failure is a concern, get OWC's RAID portable enclosure and set it to RAID-1 (mirror).

cheers!
 
I recently bought a Goflex drive, and am having great luck with it so far. I've always been a WD man, as I have never had one die on me.

I have a dual drive FW800 enclosure that I use for Time Machine and video editing, but I needed storage for my expanding iTunes library. My dual drive enclosure is just too loud with its fan, to be on all the time.

I was a bit turned of by the lastest WD externals and some of the problems I had been reading about, particularily in mounting.

I found the 1Tb Goflex USB 3.0 drive locally, along with the FW800 base for less $100 total. So I now have a mutlitude of interfaces, for cheap.

I reformatted to HFS, deleting the software based stuff on the drive. Too many problems. It mounts reliably, shuts off when not needed and is quiet. The FW800 base stays cool under load. Speeds are slightly less than my dual drive enclosure, but not by much.

Good drive so far.
 
@shooting rubber
Reformatting the external hard drive didn't cause any problems right. First time Mac owner and wanted a good external drive minus the software.
 
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