Having Hard Time - Which External Hd ? Options

[Milca]

Hello guys

I’m planning to buy two external HD
one for my samples and one for my back up.( I have also two internal ones - one for recording audio and other one as a boot drive)
I ‘ve read bunch of reviews and posts and still I’m not sure which way should I go.
From all I’ve read it seems to me that the most important issues is
whether should I buy enclosure and HD separately or buy it like it is from the store.

This has left me with 3.different choices
1) Go with the HD like Seagate Push button 300 GB or Maxtor One touch 300 GB
(Both firewire and USB)
or new Seagate Free Agent( USB, SATA) 320 GB ( this one is without power supply - don’t know whether that is not an issue ? )
With those I’m pretty sure they would be all right for back up purposes but as far as running samples ( and possibly recording I’m not sure whether temperature and “heat issues “ would not be a problem)

2) Second choice would be to go with HD like Glyph which are advertised as “external storages for audio production”.I’m not really sure whether they are really that good or it is just marketing strategy to promote them - they are pretty expensive - anybody is using those?

3)Go with enclosures.Lot of people doing music production is describing this as an ideal solution.Since I’m a newbie - I can’t see all the advantages of this setup (besides the price) And mainly I’m not a technical geek and so I’m little worried how I would put it all together and about later stability.
I would really appreciate any feedback as far as which way you should go.
I’m stuck on this issue for a long time and can’t come up with good answer.
Thanks for your time

[lepetitmartien]

As respectful about Glyph as I am, I'm not of the ones who can justify the price, it's standard good quality drives with quality enclosures in a studio form.

You can do just fine with enclosures and internal drives you choose, I'd say 95% close to it. You choose if there's a fan or not, bus powered or not, the drive… Take firewire enclosures btw…

I like the ICE pleiade enclosure very much (with quiet drives)(and as I write it everywhere when asked…), and regarding to drives in order : Seagate, Samsung, Maxtor.

I don't see the interest of back up drive sold per se, something like the preference pannel "Déjà Vu" is more than enough (daily, weekly, monthly back ups of the folders you want to the drive you want) now…

[lepetitmartien]

I may add (was very tired yesterday eve… had to stop short)

I've never used back up ready hard drives so I can't say much about them. I way for a software solution, as I said, Déjà Vu is a KISS solution (keep it simple stupid).

Watch for Oxford or Initio bridged enclosures, check hard drives specks:
- MTBF
- noise
- seek time (important for samples)
- read time (same plus playback of audio)
- write time (recording)

Not all are important for the back up (where MTBF and write are way more important)

All the specs are at the drive manufacturer website.

[Milca]

Thanks a lot for your input.I have to really consider enclosure combo.
By the way - this is a great forum.

thanks again
Milan

[lepetitmartien]

Glad to help

[CanadaRAM]

Packaged External drives sometimes have only 1 year warranty, whereas the internal drive mechanisms you buy usually have 3 to 5 years. Also some brands (Maxtor for one) do not allow you to open the case to take out and recover data from the hard drive, if the enclosure fails - they will void the warranty if you open it.

One option is to buy a good enclosure, and put in the 'internal' drive of your choice. It takes 2 minutes to assemble. That way you have complete control of the brand and model of drive mechanism, and you can be sure to get a 16 Mb cache.

For a Mac, get a Firewire drive. USB is much slower in real world performance than Firewire (I benchmarked USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 on the same drive. A 1.3 GB file transfer was almost exactly twice as fast on Firewire 400)

No Macs come standard with eSATA ports.
eSATA is an option only if you can install an eSATA interface card and can afford the extra. eSATA is useful because it reduces the load on the Firewire bus if you are using a Firewire interface. But you cannot add eSATA to a Mini, a MacBook or an iMac.

Many of the 'one touch backup' software bundles are Windows only. Check before you consider that as a factor in a purchase.

Avoid bus powered drives, unless you absolutely must have a portable solution without AC adaptors,
AC powered drives are more reliable.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM

This post has been edited by CanadaRAM: Sat 14 Jul 2007, 21:27

[lepetitmartien]

Plus:

- USB drives are NOT bootable
- USB is bad at streaming/real time use.

So: Firewire rules