Storage: What you got?

Well, I'm not exactly the best example, but I have an old 200GB Seagate HD that spins at 5400RPM. Pics later!

 

Maxtor 160GB Drive - [Media storage]
Maxtor 320GB Drive - [Media storage]
Bufallo 500GB Drive - [time machine]


I'd like to eventually replace the Maxtor's with GDrives or something that matches my mobile work station better.

 

External:

500GB LaCie Big Disk Extreme (triple interface)
500GB (2x 250GB) Formac. I hate this HD.
500GB WD in a generic SATA-capable housing.
500GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro Aluminum. I don't think I'll ever buy another brand after owning this HD. It's great.
250GB (I think) DigitalPlanet FW400 drive

Internal:

500GB Samsung SpinPoint. This is my current HD of choice. NewEgg has the 750GB and 1TB models on sale today. I'm very, very tempted to stock up.

Side notes:

I'm expecting a 7200.11 750GB Seagate to replace the seven (yes, seven) drives with faulty firmware they've sent me. That might go into my iMac, or it might go into a multi-drive OWC housing that I haven't bought yet. My old 250GB HD from my iMac needs a home, too, hence the multi-drive enclosure.

What's on them? Time Machine and DVD/music/software backups in lossless formats like Apple Lossless or disk image files (I'm big on digitally archiving all my media). I can never have too much external storage, though the tidier members of my household would probably say otherwise.

 

[external]
500gb Lacie d2 quadra on FW800
160gb Simpletech junkdrive (5 years old now) on USB2
[internal laptop hard drive, 160gb 5400]

 

If you're looking for a decent external RAID enclosure, I would recommend looking at something from Stardom. There is bound to be something in their range that fits your requirements & their stuff is very well built & of very high quality. Thecus also deserves a look.

Personally, I have the following;

Desktop;
160GB SATA Seagate Barracuda (boot/root/home/tmp)
320GB PATA Seagate Barracuda (storage)
320GB USB Seagate Barracuda (manual backup of storage)
I want to replace the USB disk with another PATA one so I can run them in a nice internal mirrored RAID. Though it's already reporting 88% used, so I should probably save my pennies for a TB RAID5.

Laptop;
60GB SATA Toshiba

Decomissioned desktop;
2x 40GB PATA Seagate Barracuda
60GB SATA Maxtor

Decomissioned fileserver;
6.4GB PATA Quantum Fireball (boot)
20GB PATA Maxtor (scratch)
2x 20GB PATA Seagate Barracuda (mirrored RAID)

Decomissioned mediamachine;
40GB PATA Barracuda

Spare externals;
80GB USB Maxtor (3.5")
40GB USB Samsung Spinpoint (2.5")

As you can see, I favor Barracudas somewhat

Of course, I also have a whole myriad of older drives, IDE & even SCSI, ranging in size down to about 48MB.

 

Internal: 160 gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.9
External (Time Machine): 400 gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 OWC Mercury Elite Aluminum
External (Master Archives): 250 gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 OWC Mercury Elite Aluminum
External (Book shelf, retired archive storage): 80 gb Western Digital Caviar LaCie Porsche

As another has said, after owning an OWC Mercury Elite Aluminum, I doubt I'll ever buy another brand external drive.

Also, I'm partial to Seagate drives.

 

How about a Drobo? I'm not sure what you want to spend -- or if FW800 is a big deal for you -- but they work great fro mall I hear. A little slower than USB2.0, but for something like Time Capsule -- it's be sufficient -- and nearly fool-proof.

 

Media Storage

• 1 TB Newer Tech Guardian Maximus (RAID 1)

External Backup (bootable)

• 320 GB WD PATA (Venus DS3 FW400/800/USB2 enclosure)

LAN Backup

• 1 TB Time Capsule (to be ordered soon)

 

I'm using a Thecus N4100+ NAS with 4 x Hitachi Deskstar 500Gb drives.

Although I use mine in RAID5 config, you can easily pop in whatever size discs you like and run it as a JBOD setup.