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Geek Culture / External drive recommendations?

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Phaelax
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 13:34 Edited at: 4th Sep 2009 13:46
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I'm looking for an external drive that supports RAID 1 and eSata at a price somewhere around $200. I'd like a minimum of 500GB storage per drive. So far, these 3 are my options:

Fantom G-Force MegaDisk MDE2000 2x1TB - $200
($160 for the 1TB)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204072

LACIE 2big Quadra 1TB - $240
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154355

Cavalry 2-Bay RAID 2x1TB - $190
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091

I like the Cavalry design and price, but the popsicle stick reviews make me question it. The Lacie is a bit pricey with only 1TB(total or each hdd?) of storage, but drives are hot swappable; though that isn't a feature I really need. Fantom so far I think looks to be the top choice.

I also haven't ruled out the thought of purchasing an empty enclosure and supplying my own drives, but I haven't looked through many yet.

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lazerus
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 13:41
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This is from the UK Play.com

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9752952/Seagate-Expansion-1TB-External-USB-Desktop-Hard-Drive/Product.html

Its a 1TB drive, its the best and cheapest i have found. It works really well so its all good. I checked out a few for you and they seem to have some serious faults with the others, Power pack faulty, drive sticking ect this one dosnt seem to have any of them problems...

Hope i helped.

"Good never just happens, fate feels pity and grants a calm before the storm...
"
http://lazerus-reborn.deviantart.com/
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BiggAdd
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 13:44 Edited at: 4th Sep 2009 13:47
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There is the option of Western Digital:
$229 for 2TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136281

$109 for 1TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136186

Seems to have better reviews than the Cavalry and Fantom (And is cheaper for the 1TB model)
I don't own them personally, but I have a Western Digital and Seagate Internal drives which have never failed on me.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 13:46 Edited at: 4th Sep 2009 13:48
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None of those have RAID

I too love WD drives, seagate follows just behind them. But I have had a 300gb seagate fail on me and they wouldn't RMA it (long story).

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BiggAdd
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 13:49 Edited at: 4th Sep 2009 13:50
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The Western Digital 2TB mirror edition has RAID:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=466

Quote: "
Easy to set up, easy to use - You're up and running in a few simple steps. WD's intuitive RAID wizard software lets you easily modify your RAID settings."


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Van B
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 13:57
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I've used quite a few different external drives, and had trouble with pretty much all of them. The main reason I have to comment is that you have a Lacie drive mentioned there - If I was entitled to 1 vito, it would be against Lacie. I bought 2 lacie big disk 1tb drives, plenty features, firewire and everything, well built - yet both of them failed within a year. One of them I opened up to find one of the drives leaking oil!

So avoid them... The best external drive with Raid I've used has to be the Buffalo Terastation TS-H2:



Now this is a serious backup system, it connects via network or USB - it even allows USB drives to be connected and used to backup the Terastation. It has a web front end and can be configured til your blue in the face, restricting access for certain users etc, setting up backup jobs. It's a great piece of kit, and although it's expensive you should look at this sort of thing, because an external USB drive is not a good backup solution - a networked NAS box like that one is a permanent solution for backup that remains dynamic (unlike say, a tape system).


Health, Ammo, and bacon and eggs!
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 14:00
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Argh! WD! Run!

http://www.orbportals.com/BackOffice/technologygadgets/western-digital-mybook-sucks-the-returning-return/

http://www.cosmosart.org/en/blog/comments/western_digital_my_book_pro_edition_sucks_but_new_player_is_in_the_house/

http://blog.stpworks.com/archive/2008/02/27/western-digital-my-book-sucks-big-time.aspx

http://thatisright.blogspot.com/2007/10/beware-of-western-digital-hard-drives.html

Honestly, you'll NEED RAID if you buy a WD drive. The hard disks themselves aren't so bad. A little substandard in reliability. But the interfaces are awful. I know two people who bought a WD external, and in both cases the interface went and I had to strip the enclosure down to the drive and back everything up. SMART tests came back bad, too. A lot of dead sectors. I've had two WD hard drives (not by choice) and both of them died premature deaths, too.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 4th Sep 2009 14:17 Edited at: 4th Sep 2009 14:17
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Quote: "The Western Digital 2TB mirror edition has RAID"
:
I like it, but $250 and $300 for 1 and 2TB setups is a little pricey.

Quote: "Honestly, you'll NEED RAID if you buy a WD drive."

I've been using them for 15 years and the last one that failed was an 8gb, which they replaced. I don't think anyone could convince me any drive was better than WD. You mentioned the SMART tests. I had a seagate go bad, failed every SMART test but passed seagate's RMA tool.


That Buffalo looks awesome, and it better be considering the price! But a NAS would be nice to have.


After some reading on internal drives, looks like you can't use standard WD drives in raid and WD won't support it. You need to buy the enterprise drives instead, which are about $60 extra. No idea if its different for their Green drives.

However, it did just occurred to me my Abit mobo has 2 sata through JMicron RAID controller(0,1,JBOD) and 6 sata through the ICH9R(1,5,10) chipset. My case also supplies a housing cage on the bottom for extra drives, such as for a raid system. It'd probably be cheapest to just use that instead of an external since the only reliable ones are expensive as Van pointed out.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 11th Oct 2009 04:11 Edited at: 11th Oct 2009 04:14
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I finally bought one. I picked up a Buffalo NAS on sale for about $240. (plus a case of bawls )

Gigabit ethernet
RAID 0, 1, JBOD
2 USB ports on it for harddrive or printer (or whatever i guess)
DLNA certified (which I'll be testing here shortly)

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-pro-duo/


Blah, it comes with Hitachi deathstars!

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