External Drives ?

[wangell]

I know this has been discussed (many times) before, but I couldn't find it in my searches. I am assuming that firewire is still preferable over USB2 for external drives? Has anyone tried external SATA?

What drives have people found good and bad. I was leaning towards a couple of Lacie's, but heard a number of issues with heat and drive failure. I'm using all Seagate Baracuda's in my desktops and have been very happy so am looking hard at that option. Seagate does not yet offer external FW800 or SATA, but Maxtor does. My past with Maxtor hasn't been the greatest, but may be worth a try if FW800 or SATA connectivity will provide much benefit.

Lastly, External SATA or FW cases run about $40 - $60 with PSU and paired with a drive (Seagate 250Gb 7200 SATA150 = $89) is a much less expensive alternative to designed external drives. Is this a viable option or does it present a number of problems (overheating, shock, etc) that make it better to stick with drives specifically designed to be external?

On a side note - Where are you purchasing computer components? For a long time I was very happy with mwave and newegg, but mwave is running into problems with visa so I'm shying away from them and newegg seems to be continually out of stock on alot of stuff I need. Page and ZipZoomFly are the others I've used a fair amount.

Thanks,

[daeron80]

Lacie is just a name on a case. I bought two Lacie 160 GB drives, one firewire and one USB2, thinking to use the firewire for the main audio drive and USB2 for backup. Both turned out to have Seagate Baracudas inside - same drive, just a different interface.

I couldn't get any kind of decent performance on the firewire drive, and in trying to reformat it from FAT32 to NTFS it got all screwed up. Windows couldn't even finish formatting it. I took it back to CompUSA, and they exchanged for an identical unit. Same deal.

So I removed it from the firewire case and installed it in an IDE slot. It formatted then, but performance was still spotty. So I tried the USB2 drive for audio, and it has given me superb service for almost a year now - even 32 tracks at once, no problems. I use the firewire-cum-IDE one for backup, and it has done fine for that.

I prefer to buy most computer parts locally so I can more easily return if defective or whatever.

[westcoast101]

I'm using a Wiebetech FW800 TrayDock enclosure with a WD 160GB 7200rpm/8mb cache IDE drive. Works great with PTLE 7.1 on my Fijitsu laptop and 002R although I formatted the drive using the default NTFS allocation size. I'm going to reformat it using the recommended 32K size and see if that makes a difference. You can also use SATA drives in the TrayDock using a SATA tray. I'll be testing external SATA enclosures in the next few months.

-WC

[Aussie Scott]

You just need to make sure you get 7200 rpm (at least), 8MB cache, and 911 chipset (check the compatability docs for more info).

cheers, Scott

[scar97]

Glyph gt series all the way here. No problems at all and rock solid. You get what you pay for in my humble opinion. They specialize in audio drives so I will stay with them since the clients don't ever want to hear "oops we need to do this CD again"

[wangell]

Thanks All.

I'd looked at Glyph and know they have a great reputation, but they also cost about 4x other options. Some nice features, but for the $389 a 250gb 050Q costs I can put 4 of the identical drives (Seagate 7200.9 250gb = $79/ea) in an external case and get the benefits of data protection, higher performance, and more storage capacity.

So, having looked at a number of options I'm going with the SIIG SATAII expresscard, 2 Seagate 7200.9 250gb, and a Coolgear 2 drive SATAVault.