Hard Drive Preference: Lacie or Maxtor?

[MT]

I used to buy all Western Digital drives, but their quality has gone down in the past few years. I've personally had three of their 7200 drives crap out on me, but I've got an older 5400 drive that's been running for 5 years.

I've had great luck with Maxtor SATA drives over the past year. I have three of the 8MB/7200's all over 200 GB. Love them.

I owned one of the PPA Oxford drives. It's a nice enclosure, but the WD drive they sold with it crapped out in one month. PPA replaced it very quickly though. I ended up giving it to a friend.

MT

[pcm]

I have been using nothing by WD for severasl years now for all my audio drives. One has died. But I have also used Seagate, Maxtor, IBM/Hitachi, and have had losses there as well. Overall, I still put my $ on WD. I beat them up very badly, no wonder I lost one!

[qo]

I've never ever lost a drive; from my first Commodore 64, through 2-floppy PC's running DOS with no hard drives, through a gazillion PC's, both desktop and laptop, of various flavors with hard drives, and through 6 Macs.

I'm at a loss to explain this. I think it has something to do with backing everything up religiously. If you backup, then a drive failure isn't as painful. Therefore the drive is much less likely to fail. It's a universal law I believe.

[MT]

Originally posted by qo:
I've never ever lost a drive; from my first Commodore 64, through 2-floppy PC's running DOS with no hard drives, through a gazillion PC's, both desktop and laptop, of various flavors with hard drives, and through 6 Macs.

Lucky you.

But, for the record, the Commodore 64 didn't have a hard drive.

Edit - I'll also add that last week I killed two of these LaCie external drives. Lightscribe is really cool, but not ready for bulk duplication if that's what you're after.

Also, old-computers.com is a great time killer!

<small>[ August 16, 2005, 11:07 AM: Message edited by: MT ]</small>

[Timeline]

Where's rainman when you need em?

[Shooshie]

Originally posted by MT:

Originally posted by qo:
I've never ever lost a drive; from my first Commodore 64, ...

But, for the record, the Commodore 64 didn't have a hard drive.

He never said "hard" drive. Just, he never lost a drive. He goes on to say PCs with 2 floppies, etc. He's just saying that he's been very lucky with drives in general.

I have lost very few drives. I used to get drive corruption when I tried driver-level compression, but reformatting the drive always fixed it (but lost the data). I always backed up everything three times, so it didn't matter.

Unfortunately, because of my zeal for backups, I now have files from 1984 which can be found in no less than 20 places in my current system of drives. Dozens of other places on old floppies, Syquest removables, and Zips. All my drives still work. I've never had a hardware failure.

I dropped a Syquest EZ 135 on the floor while it was accessing a disk one time. It was stunned for a moment, but completed the transfer. It hit hard, too. That removable disk had a bad spot in it afterward, but otherwise worked fine. Drives today are amazingly resilient. Compare that to the old original Winchester technology when people used to transport a hard drive as if they were carrying nitroglycerin. We've come a long way. Hard drive technologies amaze me. That we can make an actual metal stylus that tracks that fast, that accurately, and at such high resolution, is nothing short of phenomenal.

Shooshie

[MT]

Originally posted by Shooshie:
He never said "hard" drive. Just, he never lost a drive. He goes on to say PCs with 2 floppies, etc. He's just saying that he's been very lucky with drives in general.

Yeah, my bad, Soosh. I automatically assumed, because of the topic, "LaCie or Maxtor?", that we were talking hard drives.

MT

[mhschmieder]

There's a lot of confusion in this discussion over what constitutes a hard drive. Most of the discussion fails to distinguish between a hard drive and the enclosure. For instance, LaCie uses Western Digital but used to use Maxtor (or is it the other way around?). They do NOT make hard drives; they make enclosures.

I don't remember the web link, but have a printed copy at home of a VERY informative shootout between various hard drives. Seagate won hands down, with the newer Hitachi drives a close second in some categories but distant in others, and everybody else left in the dust. For the types of operations that matter most to DAW's, Seagate was way ahead.

The enclosure will give you things like fan-cooling, etc. -- things that affect the failure rate and environmental noise, which matter a great deal of course but are different than general performance metrics.

I have seen significant improvements since switching from a LaCie d2 firewire drive to a Glyph firewire drive last month. Although I've only had time to do a few mixes and try a few plug-in demos that I've been auditioning, and only a tiny bit of individual tracking, the sorts of projects that used to bring my LaCie drive to its knees (and crash DP) are no longer problematic.

Glyph uses the Seagate Barricuda drive in their enclosures. I got a good price on mine (it took a lot of on-line searching), which helped with the usual differential in cost between Glyph and LaCie.

[DonaldDriver]

My friend's Lacie recently fell while on and began malfunctioning (no surprise). However, we opened it in hopes of fixing it, and sure enough inside was a normal Maxtor hard drive.

Ha, ha.

I'm not kidding or making this up. Dunno if they always use Maxtor, but Lacie does at least sometimes use Maxtor as their drive. Lacie is just another enclosure MFG (heck, maybe they don't even make those and just smooth the two parts together). Can't see why they are any better than other drives.

My HD policy is to buy one with a big warranty (5 years) and a low failure rate.

<small>[ August 16, 2005, 04:15 PM: Message edited by: DonaldDriver ]</small>

[m2]

posted August 05, 2005 04:04 PM                       
which is preferred. I can get a maxtor a little cheaper. are they the same quality

They are bascially both Maxtor.
I have about 10 FW drives and all but one are LaCie. About half of those are the d2 flavor. One started going bad and I bought a new FW enclosure from Frys to see if it was the 911 card set or the drive mechanism itself. When I opened it up the mechanism inside the LaCie was a Maxtor 250. LOL

P.S. the 400/800Mb/sec - 1394b enclosure was about 140.00 USD.

[qo]

Originally posted by MT:

Originally posted by qo:
I've never ever lost a drive; from my first Commodore 64, through 2-floppy PC's running DOS with no hard drives, through a gazillion PC's, both desktop and laptop, of various flavors with hard drives, and through 6 Macs.

Lucky you.

But, for the record, the Commodore 64 didn't have a hard drive.

Right, but I said "drive." I bought an Indus floppy to go with the C64. Fantastic floppy drive about 3x the speed of Commodore's drive, sleek, black, and a smoked black plastic door that opened using a dampened piston. Anyway, it never failed

[qo]

Originally posted by Mark Schmieder:
There's a lot of confusion in this discussion over what constitutes a hard drive. Most of the discussion fails to distinguish between a hard drive and the enclosure. For instance, LaCie uses Western Digital but used to use Maxtor (or is it the other way around?). They do NOT make hard drives; they make enclosures.

Exactly my point 4 posts into this thread. I don't know if people just didn't believe it, or what. Heh.