What would you suggest is the BEST QUALITY external Hard Drive storage out there?
Right now I store on DVDs.
I know theres lots of terrabyte storages... any experience with certain brands?
I'm seeming to think multiple smaller HDs instead of a T would be better?
no HD fails - good price for money - warranty - quality product

thank you for your time + input

No mechanical HD is 100% fool proof, always have a second backup.
That said, I've been using almost exclusively Western Digital over the years and haven't have any catastrophic issues (yet).

Most consumer grade external drives don;t have adequate cooling.

Get a couple of good enclosures and put whatever hard drive you want in them, but I would recommend a WD green drive. A good enclosure is an OWC Elite PRO Al:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW924AL1K/

The above supports esata and will run as fast as your internal drive, in addition to USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800.

- Gene

trivuong wrote:
No mechanical HD is 100% fool proof, always have a second backup.
That said, I've been using almost exclusively Western Digital over the years and haven't have any catastrophic issues (yet).

I've been using Maxtor One Touch external drives going back to 2003. Each sports season is on a separate drive. Every spring and fall I dig out the last five years and lookup early photos of the seniors. The nice thing is they all have both Firewire and USB connections so I can quickly hook them up to any PC, even my laptop. So far so good.

evie wrote:
What would you suggest is the BEST QUALITY external Hard Drive storage out there?


That's, basically, a wrong question :-)

What you want is multiple backups so that you don't have to worry about the quality of your hard drives. All hardware eventually fails.

But if you want quality hardware that will fail later :-) you'd be looking for server-grade hard drives, usually distinguishable by higher prices, > 1 million hours MTBF, and five-year warranties.

Kaa

ditto. all hard drives fail. it is their nature to do so.

so, you develop a backup/archiving strategy to get around that inevitable event.

The other thing to think about is off site storage of anything you consider important. For example I have 3 - 1TB mybook drives, one I use, one is at my girlfriends, and the other in a fireproof safe.

And remember the saying "Its not IF the hard drive is going to fail its WHEN".

I store on an iOmega Prestige 500 GB, and have never had any problems. Don't trust the hard drive though. Always have another safe copy on a separate storage device (hard drive, CD, DVD, etc.).

begin seagate rant

Whatever you do, don't buy a Seagate external Freeagent whatever. they are Cr*p! The low end Desktops don't even have a power on/off switch but do have a fan. The Desktop "Pro" don't have a fan - they get so hot in their plastic case you can barely touch them (but they do have an on/off switch so you can turn them off before they melt). They have braindead sleep timeouts you have to disable because they cause transfer errors. The esata on the high-end "Pro": a standard esata cable won't even fit on it - you have to trim the rubber around the esata cable for it to fit. And I got nothing but errors with their esata so it was a waste of money.

end seagate rant

Go for a quality case you can use over again with newer drives.

Another option is a external 2.5" drive that runs at 5400 rpm so doesn't get hot. I have a Lacie rugged 320 GB drive. It comes in a shock resistant aluminum case with rubberized bumper around it. What is nice about these are they run very cool and can run off power from the USB cable - they do not need an external power source for USB.

Gene

I will tell you absolutely positively what NOT to get. Western Digital My Book Essential external hard drives work......but!!!!.......they go into sleep mode and take several seconds to wake up......which.....slows down your computer experience dramatically.

Let's say the Western Digital externals are in sleep mode.....and you then want to open up a program on your computer........you have to wait several seconds for the WD drives to kick in before the software you wanted to launch will even start to launch.

DON'T buy WD MY Book external HD's.

I've used a ReadyNAS 600 for years now. It runs in a 4 disk Raid Configuration, which is redundant so a disk failure does not cause loss of data. I also keep images backed up on multiple hard drives.

I'm planning to get a newer model with Raid 6, it can stand two drive faults without data loss. Backups are still essential though.

IMHO, this type of a storage system really beats out a external hard drive. If you do get a external hard drive, get e-sata. USB and Firewire are really slow by comparison.

begin seagate rant
blah!blah!blah!...work like... $$H!t
blah!blah!blah!...work like... Cr@!P
end seagate rant

Now I will buy anything except Seagate. Hope this may help