External Hard Drives - Typical Life Expectancy?

OldTimey · Post by **OldTimey** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 10:40 am

my lacie D2 does that blue light flashing clicky thing. I think it has something to do with Lacie's controller, and how it interacts with Mac OS X. It is constantly going to sleep even when I tell it not to. It mounts when it wants to, and disappears out of no where. I have 4 Lacie drives at work, and they have all gone bad as well (i do heavy amounts of video processing). I've found cheap Seagate and Maxtor enclosures to be more reliable. And did i mention cheaper? It's too bad because Lacie used to be a really fantastic company. I still have and use an external 10GB Ultra SCSI drive (15K spindle speed!!!) I bought 7 years ago for 200 bucks. It's very fast and has never given me problems. (but the fan...soooo loud. I used to keep the thing in a drawer.)

If you can afford Glyph i hear good things. On a budget, Glyph is so expensive it makes little to no sense. You can buy two hard drives for the price of one Glyph, mirror the drives, and viola, redundancy. Of course if you have the money, a drive array from Dell or Apple is really the way to go.

for my home studio i personally like the G-Tech enclosures because they don't use fans and have been 100% reliable thus far, and don't break the bank.

As far as the original question goes...there is no answer! Drives fail all the time. They can also last 10 years or more. It's a crapshoot as to WHEN a drive will fail, but you can be CERTAIN that it will eventually fail, so be sure to back up!

gearboy · Post by **gearboy** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 2:20 pm

The moral of the story is back your important data up at least three times, and keep backups in at least two locations. If you follow this rule, you keep your data, even during a drive failure.

I follow this rule of thumb with recordings, and as an Art Director at my Publishing company day gig. I've never lost anything.

Knock on wood,

Jeff

Resonant Alien · Post by **Resonant Alien** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 2:54 pm

gearboy wrote:The moral of the story is back your important data up at least three times, and keep backups in at least two locations. If you follow this rule, you keep your data, even during a drive failure.

I follow this rule of thumb with recordings, and as an Art Director at my Publishing company day gig. I've never lost anything.

Knock on wood,

Jeff

+1001. I have 3 copies of my works in progress and 5 copies of my iPhoto library. one on an iMac, one on my PowerMac, one on a desktop FW drive and one on each of two portable drives. Might be overkill, but memory is cheap and losing a project or losing photos of your kids is very very expensive.

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 3:22 pm

Haha, if you own B.F.D. and Vienna Symphonic Library, memory is NOT cheap

.

I am "between" backup drives at the moment, which is not a comfortable place to be. I am still awaiting a "damaged goods" refund from Musicians Fiend after four phone calls over six weeks. I may just have to take $$ out of savings instead.

Resonant Alien · Post by **Resonant Alien** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 3:37 pm

mhschmieder wrote:Haha, if you own B.F.D. and Vienna Symphonic Library, memory is NOT cheap .

He he. It's all relative isn't it?

garryc · Post by **garryc** » Sat Apr 12, 2008 9:37 pm

I have had better luck using WiebeTech Drive docks w/bare drives (Combo dock & Firewire Drive docks) over using external drives. Every external drive I have has failed at one point or another. I suspect that some of the external drives I have used don't keep the drives as cool as the Wiebetech setup (no cases, just bare drives)

Also, I tend to keep active projects on internal drives, mainly using external drivedocks for off loads or backups. For heavy drive accessing programs/projects, I find internal drives more stable than those connected by FW.

I have a few Drivedocks and I am able to copy/move files freely. The bonus is NOT having a whole load of cases & power supplies. I have over a dozen bare drives and 3 drive docks. It's much more managenable.

Garry

KarlSutton · Post by **KarlSutton** » Sat Apr 12, 2008 10:13 pm

I echo the plug for OWC's drives, I've got 4 of them & the oldest one is 7 years going good.

I had a LaCie d2 360 go out on me but I never looked at the power supply as the issue. hmmm.

What confused me about the lacie is that there are two drives inside?
(is that why it's called d2?) Why is that? Can these be put into a new case?

KarlSutton · Post by **KarlSutton** » Sat Apr 12, 2008 10:15 pm

I echo the plug for OWC's drives, I've got 4 of them & the oldest one is 7 years going good.

I had a LaCie d2 360 go out on me but I never looked at the power supply as the issue. hmmm.

What confused me about the lacie is that there are two drives inside?
(is that why it's called d2?) Why is that? Can these be put into a new case?

MOTUnation.com

External Hard Drives - Typical Life Expectancy?

Wiebetech Drive Docks