Hey there!
Would love to hear some feedback, opinions and suggestions for an external dual hard dive eg. Buffalo etc. I am using a Mac workstation and have looked at scores of hard drive systems in raid configurations and would like to hear from members as to their experiences good bad or indifferent as to their opinions. Right now I am leaning toward the Buffalo Drivestation Duo 2TB.
They are good but overpriced, I buy 2X1 TB drives, put them in an external enclosure and use eSATA ports to configure them as RAID1, it ends up being about $250 with enterprise-class Seagate drives. If and when one drive dies I can replace it quickly. Checkout ratings and user reviews on newegg.com to see if any issues/bugs have been reported.
Arash
Yes, I hear you loud and clear. I looked to build one myself however the cost exceeded the price I found for the Buffalo Drivestation Duo 2TB. B&H has it for $259.00, the bottom line is most manufactures only cover the hard drive for a year. The few that exceed a year do not cover the data in the drive just the drive itself. Once you lost your data it seems little consolation to me.
Phil
The bottom line is that you do not know what HDD you are getting when you buy the Buffalo. These are NOT as well tested as the OEM ones. I would do what Arash is recommending.
Another option is to buy a used DROBO which is what I did. MUCH MUCH easier to manage (check DROBO issues first) compared to the suggestion by Arash, but his suggestion works well too.
BTW, most OEM drives are warranteed by manufacturers for 3 years, some for 5 years. There have been a lot of issues with Seagate 1.5TB HDDs. I would stick with the WD Caviar Black (or for power savings Green) versions for now.
-- Vivek
After much research it came down to two units, the Drobo and Lacie 2TB Big Quadra. Long and short I decided on the Lacie Quadra. For the same money as the DROBO I can purchase a 2TB quadra and install a top quality green 2TB hard drive in my work station. This would be in addition to the two other external 1TB drives I am currently using.
I've seen 2 TB USB (single) drives for $195, e.g. seagate with 5-year warranty. 2TB have been out for a while, larger capacities should be put soon.
Roger
Appreciate your input Roger, not sure of which Seagate you are referring to however, The Lacie is a raid unit and is hot swapable @$299 sounded real good to me.
Phil,
e.g. Check this out at newegg.com:
Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc..._-NA-_-NA-_-NA
$199.
I think Western Digital has 2 TB drives out too. I think for a while now, so soon we should see higher capacity.
Roger
Nice catch Roger, price is good but be careful it's 5900 rpm only, slower than the usual 7200 rpm drives. I recommend this one, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148278 it's a Seagate 1TB Barracuda ES (Enterprise) drive. This is a server drive, the difference is it supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) to reduce RAID overhead and perform faster in RAID 0/1 configuration. It also has a special recover feature that allows you to recover data using Seagate sw if there is a failure. More expensive than regular 1TB but worth for those valuable photos. On my PC I can get about 85MB/sec bandwidth for each drive which is great for thousands of large RAWs.
Oops, we were talking external drives. Here is a 2TB external for $219:
Seagate FreeAgent Desk ST320005FDA2E1-RK 2TB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 External Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148417
Arash,
regarding 5900 rpm versus lower capacity drive at 7200 rpm, remember the data density is going up, so the higher capacity drives can both write and read faster at a slower rpm. Where you lose is seek and rotational delays, but for large images, this is less of a concern as large blocks of data are read/written at a time and this stuff is mitigated by the cache anyway.
Roger
Hi Roger,Originally Posted by rnclark
IM experience 5400 rpm drives are very slow due to seek time, data is fragmented most of the time, my labtop has a 2.5" 500GB 5400 drive and it is just painfully slow despite having higher data per area density :( cost and lower power at the expense of speed. I always look at TH benchmarks before buying http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...hput,1010.html
Last edited by arash_hazeghi; 08-23-2009 at 12:16 PM.
Arash,
Remember, we are talking about external USB hard drives for backup, not internal drive database performance. The speed to read or write is limited more by the USB interface than by drive speed by a long shot. And You'll note that what I referenced was a 7200 RPM drive not a 5900 rpm dribe, and the difference in price from the slower drive was only $20. So if drive speed concerns you on a USB interface, go ahead and spend the extra $20.
Roger
Hi Roger,
Right, USB is sure slow I use an external enclosure that has eSATA port and hook it up directly to eSATA port on the motherboard, this is the enclosure I have highly recommended :) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817347017
Windows Vista has a glitch with eSATA though (this also applies to eSATA RAID), if you put your PC to sleep and then wake up it can force too much current and kill your drive, this happened to me once :(
Photo backup is becoming a headache!
Best
Well Gents
I decided on the Lacie 2TB Big Quadra as my external drive for image back up, have it set to Raid 1 where the two drives mirror each other. Just got this puppy today and so far it's been a breeze to set up and configure. Occasionally the fan kicks in and creates a little noise otherwise there is no sound coming from the enclosure. So far so good, I really did my homework on my choice and feel I made the right choice between this and the DROBO unit.
All the best
Phil
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