Howdy Folks,

I'm looking to buy an external FW800 drive for my Protools 7/G5/dual2.5/10.3/4gRam

My budget is around 200-250.

Any recommendations?

Thanks in advance,

Chocolate

The best I can do is refer you to this website (http://www.smartratings.com/computers/hard_drives) and read through all the reviews, expert and user, that you can access. This way, you might get an idea which one is the best for your budget. Hope it helps.

Well, I use NOTHING but Maxtor drives with the 16MB Cache (NOT the older ones) after YEARS of suffering through TERRIBLE LaCie crap and multiple failures. I only have ONE Lacie drive that still works out of 6 that were in my studio. And these did NOT die of "old age"...many were within the first year of use. And Lacie was of NO help whatsoever...

I have 10 Maxtor drives now, and they work perfectly (the newer lines, anyway...look for those with at least a 16MB Cache)...

www.pacificproaudio.com just what you need and very reasonable. fits ALL budgets

I have Maxtor, IBM (ooch it's old) and Seagate drives, all work fine, but the Seagates are the silent bunch. I have bought enclosures to fit them in (pleiades ICE).

I was going to say LaCie I've never had an issue with mine in 2+ years of use.

Hi!

I have 5 FW La Cie: 3 of them have failed (defective bridge).
Fortunately I could take the IDE internal drives out and put them in another FW enclosure.
This happened after a little more than 2 years.
"Apart from that", they work fine as well as very silently.

LPM, I didn't know the Pleiades enclosures.
Where did you buy them?
Regards,

Dewpill

I bought them here in france, their name is ICECUBE Pleiades, it's fanless all alu enclosures with oxford bridges.

Just googled and they are available easily online. Note that they are sold under other names depending where you buy them. For example, some of the enclosures sold at cooldrives or firewiredirect are very similar.

I have also a spare Icy Box enclosure for SATA drives, it works fine, but it's not rugged enough if you're on the move and I won't be confident for heavy duty jobs (regarding temperature, not enough contact to dissipate the heat).