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The Best Dang HardDrive

sahni130

sahni130

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 25, 2008
677
416
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
hello everyone,
I am looking for the best and most reliable external HDD to use with Time Machine on my Mac. So it has to have Firewire, it has to be reliable, has to be 500GB, and it has to cost less than $160-175. So what brands are reliable and good? What do you suggest?
 
sahni130 said:
hello everyone,
I am looking for the best and most reliable external HDD to use with Time Machine on my Mac. So it has to have Firewire, it has to be reliable, has to be 500GB, and it has to cost less than $160-175. So what brands are reliable and good? What do you suggest?
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reliability can be measured many ways. Do yo want a reliable drive or a reliable backup system? If you step back and look at the bigger picture you'd have better over all reliability if you bought two external drives for $100 each. And then rotate them keeping one of them far away from the computer.

If you want a reliable single drive then get drive drives configured as a mirror

Don't spend so much on one drive that you can't afford two. Two drives is always, by far more reliable than one drive. No matter what the brand

Get an enterprise-grade SATA drive (e.g., Seagate) and put it in a nice Macally aluminum enclosure.
Click to expand...

What the above points out is that even if you buy from g-tech, you will have no clue what you are getting. g-tech does not make disk drives. They buy them from someplace, put them inside aluminum boxes and sell them. You really can't know what's in there. But if you buy the above Seagate you know it is top of the line with a 5 year warranty.
 
ChrisA said:
reliability can be measured many ways. Do yo want a reliable drive or a reliable backup system? If you step back and look at the bigger picture you'd have better over all reliability if you bought two external drives for $100 each. And then rotate them keeping one of them far away from the computer.

If you want a reliable single drive then get drive drives configured as a mirror

Don't spend so much on one drive that you can't afford two. Two drives is always, by far more reliable than one drive. No matter what the brand



What the above points out is that even if you buy from g-tech, you will have no clue what you are getting. g-tech does not make disk drives. They buy them from someplace, put them inside aluminum boxes and sell them. You really can't know what's in there. But if you buy the above Seagate you know it is top of the line with a 5 year warranty.
Click to expand...

what i want is a reliable drive that lasts long. can you tell me more about making your own external harddrive?
 
Wow, there are probably about 114314495+ threads on this.

And I would recommend Time Capsule.
I believe it's partially made for Time Machine.
 
well.. i'd try push you towards a drobo but i rather have you get a western digital drive if thats your price range than other brands like seagate, lacie, and other brands cuz i had plenty problems with those and customer service towards me was horrible
 
"What the above points out is that even if you buy from g-tech, you will have no clue what you are getting. g-tech does not make disk drives. They buy them from someplace, put them inside aluminum boxes and sell them. You really can't know what's in there. But if you buy the above Seagate you know it is top of the line with a 5 year warranty.[/QUOTE]"

While this may be true for companies such as LaCie, I'm almost 100% positive that all G-Tech enclosures sport Hitachi drives. Still, though, Seagate does offer the five year warranty. So, OP, I think either choice would be a good one.
 
personally i only use Western Digital and Maxtor External HardDrives, they've never failed me once, and sometimes i even transport them alot from location to location and it still remains strongggg
 
Chim3ra said:
personally i only use Western Digital and Maxtor External HardDrives, they've never failed me once, and sometimes i even transport them alot from location to location and it still remains strongggg
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All drives fail, it's just a matter of time. Here's my history with desktop drives:

Western Digital: 0/3 (3 yrs, 11 months, 9 months)
Seagate: 5/6 (14 days - their 1.5 TB drive, which is being replaced)
Samsung: 5/5
Hitachi (IBM): 1/1

On top of my apparent "bad luck" with WD, they have the worst customer service of any company I have dealt with. The drive that failed at 11 months was reformatted per their tech services. It worked fine for 2 more months then failed completely. They would not honor their 1 year warranty, despite the fact that I had contacted their tech support at 11 months to document the problem.

WD will never get another penny from me.
 
ChrisA said:
reliability can be measured many ways. Do yo want a reliable drive or a reliable backup system? If you step back and look at the bigger picture you'd have better over all reliability if you bought two external drives for $100 each.
Click to expand...

Seconded; for a reliable backup system, get two drives; and to be safe, use SuperDuper or such, not Time Machine, and create identical bootable backups on both drives. More work, but safer; or use one drive for TM and one for a bootable backup.

I'd look for 2 decent enclosures for SATA drives, and two quality SATA HDs by Western Digital, Seagate or Samsung, can be had for less than 200$ .

Once you go custom, you never look back, it's super easy to assemble, safes you a few bucks and let's you choose the hd.
 
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