Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
my two cents...

all hard drives die (avg life span 3-5 years).

all brands (unintentionally) ship dead, defective, and faulty hard drives.
it's all the luck of the draw.

i've bought expensive drives that started smoking right out of the box and cheap drives last years.

forget about brand names.

buy the cheapest drive you can find that is 500gb or smaller. anything larger and it's more vulnerable to have errors.

DON'T buy an external drive with TWO hard drives inside - think Lacie - (unless you can choose to mirror raid them). if one goes bad, you lose everything.

just my two cents...
 
hello
I can only speak for the Western Digital, I have the 320GB Firewire/USB2.0 Deluxe hard drive (with blue light). I haven't had any problems with it, load and access times are good and it's incredibly quiet. That's a good price for that one too. You might want to check www.newegg.com as well as www.tigerdirect.com They usually have good prices too.

I have this version of the Western Digital as well, it is a compact and quiet drive with decent speed. After about a year of varied use I don't have any complaints.
 
Forget western digital, they are not that bad but seagate still destroys all and has the best drives. As for enclosures, I think the lacie ones are the best since some of them have firewire 400 and 800. Check with lacie and find out if there are seagate drives within them: if so, you're choice is easy.
 
The bad comments on LaCie depends probably on the Porsche drive. That disk/chassis had serious heat problems, and therefore a short lifetime. :)


I have 2 LaCie Porsche drives. One is a portable one bought 6-8 months ago and the other is a desktop version that I have had for years and I have had no problems with either. The desktop has been running the entire time I have had it as I rarely shut my Mac down and still works fine to this day and I notice no heat problems. The portable one isn't on as much but takes abuse in my backpack but still works great.

Just like everything else a drive purchase is a roll of the dice. You can have a low end drive work great for years without issue or a high end drive fail in 2 days. Figure out who gives the best support and go with them. I also keep a backup of my backup just in case.
 
I've had Maxtor, Seagate and LaCie (Maxtor) fail on me in the past 5 years. The only brand I've never had fail is Western Digital.

With that said, I did decide to give Seagate another shot recently, because of their 5 year warranty.

To those who have had LaCies fail in the past, you could always buy your favorite brand of internal drive and throw it into your sweet LaCie enclosure.
 
I say, go with LaCie. My D2 is still working flawlessly after 4 years. I know other people who have/are using various iterations of LaCie drives. None of them have ever had any problems with their drives, either. Earlier this year, I bought a Seagate drive and put it in an OWC enclosure. I had a great deal on pricing for a 750GB drive...that's the only reason I went that route. Otherwise, I would had bought another LaCie.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.