Which Firewire External Drive?

I think the G drives are overpriced. The enclosure itself that they use is not the best, and based on the user reviews from apple.com - it often fails.

I purchased 2 Rosewill FW800 enclosures + 2 WD Caviar black drives. The black drives are server quality drives (the only downside is that they're louder than WD caviar green, still they're not considered to be loud).

The Rosewill enclosures that I have are fan-less. I like the way they perform.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182122

 

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™




OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro

 

LaCie d2 quadra or the OWC enclosure mentioned above.

 

Its really tough to find a really good, reliable external hard drive. I had a G-drive and I was all excited about it because of the multiple interfaces, generally good feedback, and solid-looking build quality....then 6 months later it died. One day, it just wouldn't mount on the desktop anymore. No warning. After looking online, I found many many people who had similar failures within the first year. Not good.

The biggest problem is, sure you have a warranty, and your drive may fail within the warranty period. BUT if you haven't archived all of it elsewhere, and you send the drive back in with a return authorization, if they cant get the drive fixed, all they will do is replace it. And you WONT get the bad drive back, or your info off the bad drive. Recovering old files is a steep extra cost, of course. So if you have important work, who wants to get a replacement drive when you have to forever surrender yours, the one that has your files on it? So unfortunately, I couldn't risk them tossing my old drive in the garbage and losing stuff forever if they couldn't fix it, so I didn't even send the damn thing in for service! Maybe someday I can still recover the information....... who knows. But I still have the drive. So much for the warranty.

Another thing to think about, is some of these companies say that their warranty covers a replacement, but what they don't tell you is the replacement drive may actually be a refurbished drive. So if you buy a 200 dollar drive with a 3 year warranty, and one month in, lets say it fails- your replacement is now a used refurbished drive, not a new one.

Somebody needs to make a rock-solid external drive that lasts more than a couple of years. They'll sell em by the thousands.

 

It's not tough at all. See my earlier post. Both are extremely reliable.

OWC has a great 3-year warranty.

OWC already has. They already do sell thousands of 'em.