Time to Byte the bullet

[SteveZ]

Went shopping today for another external drive, I'm looking for either a 1 tb or 2 tb desk top drive for hi res photo file storage, but there are so many to choose from. Are they all the same? Prices have really come down lately but I want one that is both PC/Mac compatible. Was looking at the LaCie brand. Any other suggestions?

[Chris_Brown]

Any other suggestions?

I recommend the RAID 1 solution from OWC. They use Hitachi drives and a cooling fan in a quality enclosure. I would avoid La Cie. All their external drives I've had have died.

[Ken Rahaim]

Spend the extra money on a quality enclosure. I went the macgurus.com route after having several cheapie WD & LaCie enclosures fail on me and my colleagues.

[Rein]

Went shopping today for another external drive, I'm looking for either a 1 tb or 2 tb desk top drive for hi res photo file storage, but there are so many to choose from. Are they all the same? Prices have really come down lately but I want one that is both PC/Mac compatible. Was looking at the LaCie brand. Any other suggestions?

I use a ReadyNAS NV+ with three Seagate Barracuda drives - works like a charm.  
 
Rein

[Misirlou]

I've had one of those 1TB Western Digital MyBook World drives for about a year now. Paid about $180 US for it. It's pretty slow. But what I like about it is that it has a server built in (Linux-based, but that's totally transparent to the user). So if you hook it to a router via the buillt-in ethernet port, as long as the router is connected to the net, you can access it remotely from anywhere in the world.

When I'm out shooting on vacation or something, I load up my pics on my laptop daily, and then have them transfer home to the mothership for safe keeping. Assuming I have net access wherever I am, if the laptop gets stolen, or its drive fails, I always have a backup at home. Pretty slick.

Ideally, I'd have another 1TB drive on my network that just syncs up wiith the MyBook every night. That way, I'd have another backup if the MyBook failed, and it would not be visible outside my internal LAN. After the holidays, 1TB drives should be available for very little, so I'll probably buy one then.

[budjames]

My experiences with Lacie have not been the best either. I had 2 of their Big Disks where the circuit board died, one during warranty and one out of warranty. I also had one power supply fail out of warranty.

I have been very happy with the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad Interface eSATA, FireWire 400/800 & USB 2.0/1.1 Enclosure Kit For SATA Hard Drives which holds a single eSata drive. I then buy Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives to install inside the enclosure. I have an eSata card in my MacPro so I use take advantage of the eSata connection on these enclosures for maximum speed. You can shop for the drives online, but I ended up spending about $270 for each unit and I have 3 of these for off site backups which I rotate through my safe deposit box at my local bank.

I also purchased two dual eSate drive FW800/400 USB 2.0 enclosure in which I installed 2 x Seagate 1TB drives for 1.8TB of usable storage. One unit sits next to my MacPro to back up the 2TB RAID inside my MP and the second is connected to my Airport Extreme for Time Machine backups of the User folders on my MacPro, MacBook Pro and my daughters MacBook.

For deep storage and backup on my network, I have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 x Seagate 1TB drives. This is a set and forget unit that is built like a tank. I have it configured in RAID-X which provides redundancy in the event that one of the drives should fail.

As you can probably tell by now, I'm pretty anal about backing up my data. All of the above units have performed flawlessly. (Knock on wood!)

Shooting still images with my Canon 1DsMkIII and HD video with my camcorder really creates the need for a lot of storage. Additionally, I have imported all of my old DV tapes into iMovie and now I'm working on converting my even older Compact VHS family video into iMovie files.

If 1TB drives aren't large enough for you, I heard that Seagate now makes a 1.5TB drive!

Cheers.
Bud James