Best Harddrive?

[BenNichols]

Hey guys and girls

Can anyone recommend a top quality Harddrive for me, will be for streaming A LOT of samples from at once. It needs to be firewire800 as thats the only port I have left, and at least 500Gb. Preferably around the £100-£130 mark.
Would it be cheaper but of equal efficiency to get one of those external internal drive bays?

Thanks in advance!
Ben

[Reegs]

Build one yourself, and throw a seagate in it. Newegg is a good place to find enclosures and hard drives.

[Steve_Karl]

Build one yourself, and throw a seagate in it. Newegg is a good place to find enclosures and hard drives.

I agree. This is a much better strategy than buying a pre packaged "help me backup" drive.

[BenNichols]

Cheers guys. Is seagate the best then? any particular drives? And any particular shells?

I wont be using this as a back-up device, but for streaming samples all day long. Will a self-built harddrive be able to cope with long days every day?!

Thanks again

[Reegs]

It should be able to. What were you talking about up there, with internal/external bays?

If you've got a spare PCI slot, go with an eSata drive and a PCI card to support the enclosures. Faster than FW800 and the PCI card will enable you to have several eSata drives.

[Craig F]

I would recommend Western Digital or Hitachi/IBM. I totally disagree about Seagate, stay away from them and Maxtor.

[Reegs]

This is the funny thing about drives.

WD's: have had two die on me.
Hitachi: never tried
Seagate: own three, and none have gone yet.

I think your experience winds up being dependent on the skill of the QA worker for the particular lot your disk comes from.

[Ranger]

Seagate its the one plus good warranty

[BenNichols]

wow, lots of different opinions. thanks guys. I'll probably pick either a seagate or lacie (as no one seems to have had bad experiences with). Building my own external drive would be too expensive for the specs i want, and transfer rate is slowed down by the enclosure (only 150mb/s as far as ive seen).

Thanks again all!

Ben

[Steve_Karl]

The only failures I've ever had (2) have been WD.
I like Seagate for the 5 yr. warranty, but have never had to use it.
Samung Spinpoints are nice also.

[AlanPerkins]

Unless I am mistaken, Lacie just make the containers and use oem drives from one of the other drive manufacturers

[C J Pro]

I'd recommend using a Seagate hard drive. I'm currently using Seagate Barracudas and am having no problems.

Also, I'd recommend ordering the parts off of NewEgg.com. Their prices tend to be cheap and the shipping is quick. I haven't had any problems with NewEgg to date.

[Michael_uk]

Hello Ben,

I completely agree with staying away from pre-built ones and making up your own. I've just made up one for my son.

I would also avoid Maxtor. I have had several of these fail, the last one only last week when the circuit board of my son's blew and the chips just fried. To rescue his data I had to transfer the circuit board from a spare then recover his files.

Regarding Seagate, this is now merged with Maxtor and due to the problems I've had with Maxtor over the years I now also also avoid Seagate, which is probably unfair but this is how it is for me personally.

I've found the best drives are Samsung. I've now been using these since they launched their oil-damped Spinpoints a few years back and they are superb.

[BenNichols]

Thanks for all the interesting and conflicting advice guys!

It seems the general opinion is that self-made hard drives (using an enclosure) are better. Can anyone confirm for me though that they have as good transfer rates? I know that they come in f800 so, 800Mb/s and all that, but i was looking at specs of enclosures and they only have 150mb/s transfer rates, which seems quite wasteful...

WHat do people think of the WD mybook studio edion 1Tb?

THanks again everyone, your input is much appreciated! :)

[Craig F]

I think you're confusing bits and bytes. the 150 is probably MB[ytes]ps which is the rate for 1st gen SATA. Uppercase B = Bytes, lowercase b = bits. FW800 is 800 Mbps = 80 MBps. There are no drives that can achive 80MBps so you're good.

[Michael_uk]

Thanks for all the interesting and conflicting advice guys!

It seems the general opinion is that self-made hard drives (using an enclosure) are better. Can anyone confirm for me though that they have as good transfer rates? I know that they come in f800 so, 800Mb/s and all that, but i was looking at specs of enclosures and they only have 150mb/s transfer rates, which seems quite wasteful...

WHat do people think of the WD mybook studio edion 1Tb?

THanks again everyone, your input is much appreciated! :)

Hello again Ben,

Just to clarify:

USB1 - 12 MB/s (Megabites a second)
USB2 = 480 MB/s
IEE1394a = 400 MB/s
IEE1394b = 800 MB/s
SATA1 = 1.5 GB/s (Gigabites a second = 1500 MB/s)
SATA2 = 3 GB/s
ESATA = External SATA for external SATA devices with a longer cable (up to 2 metres) and different cable specs to the internal SATA cables. This also requires an ESATA external port which is fitted to the latest mainboards or available as an add-on PCI card.

There are external hard drive enclosures available with ESATA. For example, the AKASA external drive case (AK-ENP2STON-BL (Blue) or AK-ENP2STON-Bk (Black) has USB2 and ESATA. Just to repeat, if using this with ESATA, you would need an external ESATA cable and port. I have read a few reports of experiments using an ESATA device with on-board internal SATA but, personally, I would go by the book. :)

[Craig F]

No Michael, those values are bits not bytes.

[Michael_uk]

No Michael, those values are bits not bytes.Thanks Craig - have corrected :)