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Really people, Thunderbolt is an option, a very good one that needs more adoption and I'm sure that we'll see more adoption in the next year. With that said, it's not like Apple has completely abandoned older I/O's strictly in favor of Thunderbolt, Apple wouldn't be that stupid. With that said, what's with all the hate?

For example, this gem of a post...



Question Navadakilla, which pre-Thunderbolt iMac had a better video card?

I can't 100% remember now, but I was debating between a 2011 27" iMac with 512 video card, or a 2010 27" same specs with 1gb card, (these were both refurbished), and I opted for the newer one,
 
MyBook doesn't have a good reputation. Would never drop that much money on a product of that company.

I'll see what G-Tech will do. Their drives are reliable and stackable.
 
After the failures of Seagate Firewire drives, I won't use them ever again.

My Goodness people.

Every. Drive. Fails.

Often.

The only way you can safely guard against it is to, at minimum, maintain a time offset backup (not raid1) on different types of drives, preferably with either different enclosures, or int/ext pairs.

More realistically, it would be much better to do the following:

Working Data Set on RAID1/5/10 depending on capacity/speed needs.
Backup Data Set on RAID1/5/6 depending on capacity needs (different manufacturers drives, or at least different batch lots)
Offline Backup Data Set on LTO3/4/5 depending on capacity needs.

Just make sure to have your LTO drive serviced every year or so and your golden.

None of it is extremely expensive, especially if you look around on eBay.

You'll get good speed on your working drives, with some inherent redundancy. You'll get decent backup speeds and some redudancy their, and when you finish with a project, dump it all out to LTO which has both an excellent shelf life, and a great $/GB ratio.

This whole conversation of "this failed me once, I won't use it again" Is silly to begin with, doubly so when discussing storage mediums.

It's not surprise that they fail, and often at that.

Plan accordingly.

Karl P
 
Umm With those drives you can daisy chain them and create a 24TB logical drive. We recently bought a similar directed attach storage solution from HP for $10,000 at work(most of the other competitors prices were in the $15k range).

$2800 for that same thing via Thunderbolt is a good price and the prices will only go down from there.

And the CORVUS 10 MB hard drive cost us several thousands back when it was one of the largest networked drives available. The price of technology is almost always decreasing - until flooding happens where these are manufactured / warehoused. This is why the 1 TB HDD I want is not $95 but $135.

And the price of SSDs is falling so that today I have seen some prices of approximately a dollar per GB.
 
A shame they're still housed in those cheap looking plastic enclosures.

Only the inner air grates are plastic. The outside is a bent aluminum sheet.

Personal taste about what is ugly, I like the book look.

Don't know if it would be technical overkill or feasible to make this unit with all possible connections:

FW 800
USB 3
and TB

Now that would be enticing at the right price.

We'll wait:)

They do this with the current My Books:

2 x FW 800
1 x Mini USB
plus another I never use.
 
What is wrong with a niche market. That is where all the money is. You don't get to be a billionaire pandering to the bottom feeders.

absolutely nothing is wrong with a niche market, just my opinion that these are pricey because the person like me that that does incremental backups with CCC would not need this transfer speed. BUT the person who absolutely needs that speed will fork out the money because its more of a nessesity for them
 
I'm not sure I understand the whining about the price? G-RAID's are used heavily by some pros I know, and their costs aren't too far away from these new drives. What's the real problem here?

I think they look great...but that's me.
 
My Goodness people.

Every. Drive. Fails.

Often.

The only way you can safely guard against it is to, at minimum, maintain a time offset backup (not raid1) on different types of drives, preferably with either different enclosures, or int/ext pairs.

More realistically, it would be much better to do the following:

Working Data Set on RAID1/5/10 depending on capacity/speed needs.
Backup Data Set on RAID1/5/6 depending on capacity needs (different manufacturers drives, or at least different batch lots)
Offline Backup Data Set on LTO3/4/5 depending on capacity needs.

Just make sure to have your LTO drive serviced every year or so and your golden.

None of it is extremely expensive, especially if you look around on eBay.

You'll get good speed on your working drives, with some inherent redundancy. You'll get decent backup speeds and some redudancy their, and when you finish with a project, dump it all out to LTO which has both an excellent shelf life, and a great $/GB ratio.

This whole conversation of "this failed me once, I won't use it again" Is silly to begin with, doubly so when discussing storage mediums.

It's not surprise that they fail, and often at that.

Plan accordingly.

Karl P

You're not really telling the truth. ;)

If the drive is Firewire, then it's external, not internal.

Every single one of the FOUR HDDs in my Mac Pro has continued to function as they did when they were in 2008.

You also assume I am not using a backup plan such as :apple:Time Machine, which I do, but I also clone my boot drive periodically. :cool:
 
The My Book Duo is a great drive, but they really shine because of their network connectivity. With Terabit ethernet, it's hard to justify $200 for Thunderbolt.
 
I'll never buy another double enclosure WD drive

I've never had more power supply issues with an external drive than these monsters. Once bitten twice shy. I don't care what connectivity they have - they've forever lost my business. :mad:
Ok, I'm done ranting now. Anyone care to recommend a more reliable brand? :D
 
Insert obligatory series of posts:

for(i = 0; i < 30; ++i)
{
(average Mac user) LOL this is ridiculous who would pay that. Why do we even have TB ports. Apple is greedy
(person representing 0.3% of market) PROs do, you wouldn't know that though because all you do is use fb
(more informed Mac user) Actually Intel is being greedy because of licensing
}

True, but I worry about the long-term viability of a standard only used by 0.3% of the market.

BTW, you need to use code tags for code ;)
 
Really people, Thunderbolt is an option, a very good one that needs more adoption and I'm sure that we'll see more adoption in the next year. With that said, it's not like Apple has completely abandoned older I/O's strictly in favor of Thunderbolt, Apple wouldn't be that stupid. With that said, what's with all the hate?

For example, this gem of a post...



Question Navadakilla, which pre-Thunderbolt iMac had a better video card?

I hate it when people misuse, abuse and overuse the word hate.
You can't open your mouth without somebody calling you a hater.
I hate that. :D
 
way too much $$, firewire 800 is plenty fast for backups/clones

these are deffinately geared towards a niche market

These are not for clones are they... they are for main Drives for Video work etc. I can have a 6 tb raided drive on set that can handle my 4K Red footage - that will copy across in a couple of mins instead of 2 hours.

Given that a RED SSD module is $1500 for 128gb - I will only need 1-3 on set as opposed to 6-8 for a working day - this Drive is a Bargain.

However given these are User serviceable - they should be selling a Empty version. I've heard Icy Box will be selling thunderbolt dual enclosures soon for $200.
 
The My Book Duo is a great drive, but they really shine because of their network connectivity. With Terabit ethernet, it's hard to justify $200 for Thunderbolt.

Um...this exists...

There is 10 Gb ethernet is out there but at $500 for a full size PCI card and about $7000 for a 16 Port switch and thunderbolt is technically x2 the speed ( 10Gb/s Dual channel ) it's not really comparable.

Thunderbolt is cheap for what it does and yes the Drives are expensive now - but soon as the the Cheaper manufacturer get involved - icy box and icy dock Startech they'll soon cost nothing - even FW800 devices were expensive at the start.
 
Exactly. That's what I want too, and I don't want to pay more than $200 for it. If Thunderbolt is going to take off, there needs to be more consumer-oriented products for it.

You have to realize that the average hard drive has a slower transfer rate than FireWire 800.

Thus, thunderbolt only makes sense with raid configurations and/or SSD.

Hence the price.
 
It looks like a lot of people here have had trouble with their WD drives, but just as a counterpoint, I have been using a MyBook Studio drive via Firewire for probably about 4 years now with no issues. It's relatively quiet and fast enough for a backup drive. My only complaint is that it goes to sleep a little too aggressively and there is no way to change that.
 
I can't 100% remember now, but I was debating between a 2011 27" iMac with 512 video card, or a 2010 27" same specs with 1gb card, (these were both refurbished), and I opted for the newer one,


You do realize that the amount of memory in a video card doesn't necessarily make it better.
 
Awesomeness!

I don't know about anyone in here, but this release is exciting. I have 3 WD externals(1TB, 1TB, 500GB) and have not any problems with them at all and I have owned them for more than 3 years. My iMac is the 20" 2.66 GHz model fro 2009 and therefore wouldn't be able to use TB anyway. My wife's is the mid 2010 iMac which also doesn't use TB. The reason I am excited about this is because I now see a future drop in prices for the Firewire 800 compatible drives that my wife and I CAN use.

And perhaps I'm wrong about this, but the pricing for the TB drives looks very similar to the current pricing scheme for the firewire drives. I could be wrong though.

----------

I just have a question for the forum... I know that TB was originally conceived to use fiber optic cables instead of the traditional electrical ones, but how does the speed of TB with FO cables compare to current FO used by telecommunications companies?
 
I've had two of these drives, I get the feel the company thinks of them as disposable. Will wait for something a little more "pro" like G-Tech.

Hmm. And yet, the people complain their hard drives failed or died, and brand x or b is better or worse...
... usually are the people who think you can just chuck a portable drive into a back-pack and run.

Portable doesn't mean indestructible. Would be like the organ transplant guy throwing a kidney in a ziplock bag and not using the cooler.

Not saying that's why you have had problems... there's always been a good fail rate with hard drives, but people tend to take portable to a whole knew level.

----------

True, but I worry about the long-term viability of a standard only used by 0.3% of the market.

BTW, you need to use code tags for code ;)

It's always the tiny part of the market that paves the way for everyone else.

It's that way with every new technology. Audio/Video philes pay 3X as much for a new television technology... a year or 2 later, they're affordable to them iddle ground... another year... they're the cheapo sets at Wal-Mart and the cycle repeats. Happens with cars, computers, phones, and... external hard drives.

Look even at just how much a 1TB hard drive was a few years ago vs. now.

This is more extreme because not many people even have a TB port and can even use them. That makes making money on them harder than say, a usb 2.0 port that everyone and their mammy already has.
 
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$700 for 6TB. Good luck with that!

Well, I recently (december) just paid $1600 for an 8tb Promise Pegasus thunderbolt raid. It's setup as Raid 5 which gives protection and speed but you only get 6tb of the 8. You have to have 4 drives to do that. So it could be done with two of these drives (I think). If the internals were all setup as separate drives, they could be raid 5. But perhaps not. If they could, you could get an 8tb raid 5 for 1200 instead of $1600. But they'd also be Western Digital which have traditionally had crap enclosures. Their drives are usually fine.

These things aren't for someone looking to store their family photo album. Although I've gotten to the point that a mirrored raid is what I'm using for everything important.

----------

way too much $$, firewire 800 is plenty fast for backups/clones

these are deffinately geared towards a niche market

Yes. Video editing for the most part. But it would be nice if they had esata and FW800 interface on them too.

----------

Hmm. And yet, the people complain their hard drives failed or died, and brand x or b is better or worse...
... usually are the people who think you can just chuck a portable drive into a back-pack and run.

Portable doesn't mean indestructible. Would be like the organ transplant guy throwing a kidney in a ziplock bag and not using the cooler.

Not saying that's why you have had problems... there's always been a good fail rate with hard drives, but people tend to take portable to a whole knew level.

----------



It's always the tiny part of the market that paves the way for everyone else.

It's that way with every new technology. Audio/Video philes pay 3X as much for a new television technology... a year or 2 later, they're affordable to them iddle ground... another year... they're the cheapo sets at Wal-Mart and the cycle repeats. Happens with cars, computers, phones, and... external hard drives.

Look even at just how much a 1TB hard drive was a few years ago vs. now.

This is more extreme because not many people even have a TB port and can even use them. That makes making money on them harder than say, a usb 2.0 port that everyone and their mammy already has.

Every new mac in 2011 had a TB port. And they sold a record number of them. Look for the FW800 port to disappear so they can sell TB monitors with the ports built in. TB adapters are coming too to connect FW to TB, usb to TB, etc.
 
way too much $$, firewire 800 is plenty fast for backups/clones

these are deffinately geared towards a niche market

Firewire 800 is great, but it's not supported on the MBA, plus you can daisy chain with Thunderbolt much more easily. Plus the device support Thunderbolt offers is much larger(storage devices, monitors, external GPUs, basically any type of device one could imagine)
 
Seems that's the point though, no? If you're not looking for high performance or RAID, thunderbolt won't help you that much. You'll hit the single non-ssd drive bottleneck first, no?

arn

Not saying I'm not looking for that. I just mean that, for the price, what you gain isn't worth it. Yeah, you get high performance and RAID but you could buy 2 drives and a firewire enclosure, RAID them together and still pay a fraction of the price that these are. Somewhere a line between performance and price needs to be found because, as it stands, to get this kind of performance you need to pay ridiculous amounts of money for what is, at the end of the day, a hard drive.
 
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