External hard drives

shagman · Criminal Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 92

I did a search for external hard drives that didn't turn much up. I'm looking into buying one in the future sometime, but know very little about them. I've done a little research, but I was hoping some of you could give me a quick rundown on what to look out for and such. I would be using it mostly to store video footage for editing and probably photos as well. Thanks in advance for the help

chavez · RIP MHL 04/25/1958 - 01/11/2006

shagman, USB 2.0 is an absolute MUST on both ends.

Try to stick with the name brands - some of the Wang-Fu shtuff just ain't all that great.

We currently use 2 massive (250g) Maxtor drives to backup our office server, 1 for onsite and 1 for off. So far, so good, and the onsite drive never is shut off except for server maintenance.

www.newegg.com
www.outpost.com

etc. etc. etc.

jumalian · Ladies Man Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 7625 City: san diego

would you happen to have an extra internal hard drive layin' around? if so, you can buy an enclosure for it for around 30 bucks, attach your internal hard drive, and voila! you now have an external hard drive!

jryoung · Ladies Man Joined: 19 Mar 2004 Posts: 7664 City: Man Jose

Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital, stick to those brands, and do your shopping at newegg.com (as mentioned above).

chavez · RIP MHL 04/25/1958 - 01/11/2006

jumalian, here is a great place to pick up those external HDD cases:

www.cyberguys.com

Also, they are almost unbeatable for cabling/adapters. $100 DVI cable at BestBuy? $15 at Cyberguys! Mr. Green

shagman · Criminal Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 92

Jumalian:I wasn't aware that could be done with an internal hard drive. Let me tell you why I'm considering the external hard drive in the first place, and maybe some of you guys can help me out. I got a western digital 200 GB internal hard drive for christmas and got it installed. I was unhappy to find that the new hard drive is very slow. When I attempt to play video files, or to transfer video files between my old and new drive, the process takes forever and the video is jumpy. Did I get a bad hard drive? Did I do something wrong? It seems to store everything fine, but it is just slow and pretty much unusable for playing video. I'd appreciate any help you could give a rookie.....thanks.

chavez · RIP MHL 04/25/1958 - 01/11/2006

shagman, sounds like something is wrong with the drive. Access times should be in the milliseconds and not typically apparent to the end-user.

Also, the external drive should be much slower than the internal.

Mike Isler · Moderator Joined: 11 Jan 2003 Posts: 718 City: New York

The drives I've been using as externals are mainly LaCie, but I have a few Maxtor's as well. They're both pretty decent. I'm preferential toward the LaCie's because they're FW800, so nice and quick on my PB G4. I run RAID-1 on four of my drives for redundancy. Two LaCie's are a mirror set, and the two Maxtor's are another mirror set. I normally keep one RAID set in my safe, and update it periodically, while using the other RAID set as an active disk. I also use a single LaCie as a scratch disk and it travels with me as well.

You'll pay about $1/GB for decent disks. Just stay away from the LaCie 500GB, 1TB and 1.6TB disks. It is basically 2 (or 4 for the larger ones) disks, stuck in one box. It shows up to the computer as one large disk. What this means is, if one disk dies, you lose everything... or at least, it's going to be a royal pain to recover anything. 4 times the chance of failure... I don't like that.

For me, I have 1TB worth of drives just to protect 200GB of images. One RAID set hooked up to my computer gives me physical protection (if one of two drives dies, I don't lose anything), and the other set gives me logical protection (if someone hops on my computer or I get a virus that nukes everything on that RAID array, I have an almost identical set in my safe).

The way I'm doing things isn't even really the professional way... it's a half-ass way that works for me. In the future, I'd like to get an XServe RAID hooked up to an XServe to store my files. Plenty of redundancy and failover protection.

My images are my lifeblood, and if I lose files, I lose money, so I spend a bit to protect them. If you're just storing downloaded music and videos, this is probably overkill....

Mike

*chris* · Addict Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 982

wow mike. i thought i had alot of HD space for my computer.

Bowen · Posted: Mar 15, 2005 1:15 pm Post subject:

shagman, First off...lemme guess...you were watching a movie (over 30 min) off your harddrive?...chances are your drive is only 5200 RPM w/ 6 MB Cache... with that big of a drive, you NEED 7200 RPM and at least 8MB cache. My advice is to get a Firewire 2 enclosure and make an external.

chavez · RIP MHL 04/25/1958 - 01/11/2006

Mike Isler, hehe, that is a pretty ghetto RAID setup!

You can get pretty cheap servers capable of RAID 5. Our current setup is RAID 5 with a hot spare. I think the server (hardware+software) was $3800, which isn't exactly pocket change, but it sure is nice.

Hell, that's probably less than you have spent on some of your lenses! Laughing

Mike Isler · Moderator Joined: 11 Jan 2003 Posts: 718 City: New York

chavez, yeah man, like I said, it's a half-ass setup. I'm lookin for hardware RAID 5 in the future, probably with a DLT or LTO autoloader as well. Probably XServe w/XServe RAID, with one of those StorageTek tape libraries to store stuff on. It's just a question of cash right now! What I have works for the moment.... not in the future.

Mike

shagman · Criminal Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 92

Well I appreciate all the help and suggestions, I finally figured it out. I went to the western digital site and found that this was a common problem on Dell PC's. I had to change from BIOS setting to DMA, whatever that is, but now everything works great.

89comp · Posted: Mar 16, 2005 6:49 pm Post subject:

when you get to the StorageTek tape step Isler, write Watsoc. He works for them so maybe he can get you a sweet deal. Then come ride with us... Very Happy

chavez · RIP MHL 04/25/1958 - 01/11/2006

Mike Isler, tape with an autoloader! Damn that is some serious shiznit right there.

I would definitely hit up watsoc, that stuff is super expensive!