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Hi All,
I'm thinking of buying an external hard drive to record all audio to. I've been recommended Glyph drives as the best, though they are a bit expensive. I've seen the Carillon firewire drives which seem a bit more reasonable and look nice too. Does anyone use either of these and are there any pitfulls to avoid ?

ThankYouPlease
cxi2001

cxi2001 wrote:Hi All,
I'm thinking of buying an external hard drive to record all audio to. I've been recommended Glyph drives as the best, though they are a bit expensive. I've seen the Carillon firewire drives which seem a bit more reasonable and look nice too. Does anyone use either of these and are there any pitfulls to avoid ?

ThankYouPlease
cxi2001

Glyphs are nice, but let me warn you with my own experience. My Glyph drive remained off except when I was using it for Audio. That means, over its 3 year lifetime, it was probably only actually running for about 6 or 8 months of uptime. (it wasn't my only audio drive). One day it quit working, and nothing could bring it back. I had backups, so I didn't lose any information, but when I took it apart to find out what happened, I learned that inside it was a plain old IBM Deskstar drive, which I could have bought at the time for about $80-$120. The Glyph cost something like $400. That's a lot of money for an enclosure.

I replaced the Deskstar with another drive, so I've got my "Glyph" back up and running, but I just thought you might appreciate knowing that it's not as special as it's cracked up to be.

Shooshie

I've often wondered what was so special about Glyphs drives - do they come with some fancy formating software or are the drives tested in some way that justifies the high price?

I have an idea why your deskstar gave up; I had to replace a whole raid-system and two servers at work once because they were all fitted with deskstars from IBM. They all stopped working aprox. 6 month after first up-spin. You could totally time them.
It was a while ago but at that time we found a site with an mp3 to be able to hear the sound of a broken disk.

I use my internal drive for recording and FW-drives to do backup's on.

I just added a post related to this subject in the category general recording.

Hope this is of any help.

Arjen

I use a Lacie d2 which I've been pretty happy with, good price point and seems to be reliable. I think hard drives need to get some regular use or they become unreliable..

I really like the drives from www.macsales.com. Not expensive at all and so far after a few years reliable. They come in FW400, 800 and USB2. I'm about to order a 3rd one today.

daveyboy wrote:I really like the drives from www.macsales.com. Not expensive at all and so far after a few years reliable. They come in FW400, 800 and USB2. I'm about to order a 3rd one today.

Ditto, I have 5 of them and the oldest one is 4 years old.
So far no problems. (knock on wood)

cxi2001
Just before Xmas I had a head crash on one of my Lacie D2 drives 13 mnths old. Inside was a Western Digital 160gb. It ended up going to 2 Data Recovery facilitiesjavascript:emoticon(':(') Without getting into the whole sorted tale. The technicians from both facilities made the comment to me that there seemed to be more WD drives ending up on there tables of late.
The question I asked was, "in your experience, what drives are you most impressed with?"

Seagate #1
Quantum #2
Maxtor #3
They don't seem to have alot of these drives on their tables.
Understand that this is not to bash WD drives, it's just information from a single experience with one drive that I had go down on me.
All Storage media has it's problems.
I have since purchased Seagate and put it in my Lacie D2 cassing.
All is good.

Just thought I would pass on my experience.
By the way, I have 1 WD 40Gb drive that has been a part of the family for 7 years and still going strong.

Good luck in your hunt.
John

I have a Glyph 40Gig Xproject and one day, all my data on the drive just disappeared. I am not sure what they do to the drive, but when I bought it, I believe the manual told me NOT to repartition or format the drive as their settings they used provide the best usability for audio. Now, I am not saying I believe this, just repeating what they said.

Recently I bought this:

http://www.meritline.com/ams-venus-ds3r ... osure.html

You have to use a PC to setup Raid-1 (Mirrored) but after that, everything works automatic. I put two 250 Gig Maxtor drives in it (7200RPM) and have it hooked up to my system Firewire-800. So far it seems to work pretty nice. And, it's a good price for an enclosure.

I will say this though, I had to buy a firewire card. Trying to run my 2 896's and the Firewire-800 was causing one of my 896's to drop out. Moved the 896's to their own card and problem went away.

I refuse to not raid anymore, it's been a lifesaver. In my G5 I have two Sata drives Raided as well (software).

At work I have had about 13 LaCie d2's on line with no problems what so ever. At home I have 3 LaCie drives on line and they work real hard for me. So, if you asked me I would reccomend the LaCie's. Many different sizes and youcan get them for less than a buck a gig!!!

another vote for the LaCie drives.
pretty reliable (big knock on a big piece of wood) and not so expensive.

cheers!

FM

FM will gladly return the favor.

cxi2001 wrote:Hi All,
I'm thinking of buying an external hard drive to record all audio to. I've been recommended Glyph drives as the best, though they are a bit expensive. I've seen the Carillon firewire drives which seem a bit more reasonable and look nice too. Does anyone use either of these and are there any pitfulls to avoid ?

ThankYouPlease
cxi2001

I already told you what I think about the Glyphs. (overpriced, not necessarily reliable) But I didn't mention my other drives. I have:

External Firewire
Western Digital
Maxtor
LaCie
Que Fire
Glyph

Internal IDE
Seagate Barricuda
IBM

The sizes of these drives range from 80 GB to 200 GB. None has ever failed except for the Glyph. I also used an IBM DeskStar internal IDE drive years ago at a studio where I was recording an album. That drive failed during recording. That's two IBM DeskStars that have failed on me, and zero of any other kind. All my other drives before these were retired based on obsolescence, not failure.

Moral: beware of Firewire enclosures bearing Deskstars.

Shooshie

FM, you're one lucky dude if your lacie's have been reliable. this year alone (and no, no maltreatment, just being used for samples and everyday use, back-ups, etc), i have had 4 of my lacie 500's just die. give up the ghost. i've got 16 drives in total in the studio, and i swear i'm never buying another lacie. switched to glyph and the also the ICE drives. and a proper back-up system

I've spoken to 3 or 4 different dealers who all say they don't supply lacie's any more because they've gone downhill, because of the sheer volume of drives they're having to supply. whether that's true or not i don't know, but i definitely am steering clear of them from now on! sure other people have similar experiences with other manufacturers, though. probably bad karma coming round to me for something

doodles wrote:FM, you're one lucky dude if your lacie's have been reliable. this year alone (and no, no maltreatment, just being used for samples and everyday use, back-ups, etc), i have had 4 of my lacie 500's just die. give up the ghost. i've got 16 drives in total in the studio, and i swear i'm never buying another lacie. switched to glyph and the also the ICE drives. and a proper back-up system

I've spoken to 3 or 4 different dealers who all say they don't supply lacie's any more because they've gone downhill, because of the sheer volume of drives they're having to supply. whether that's true or not i don't know, but i definitely am steering clear of them from now on! sure other people have similar experiences with other manufacturers, though. probably bad karma coming round to me for something

wow.
no sh_t!

yeah man, so far so good.
i have two external laCie's, one i think is 240GB and the other i think it's 300GB, big beasts, they are over two years old for sure.

what i do, preparing for the day when disaster will surely strike, is to back up to DVD.
i back-up four gigs or so and then do a second back-up just in case.

sorry to hear about your drives, that sucks.

FM

FM is not intended for human consumption.

soundsun wrote:I've often wondered what was so special about Glyphs drives - do they come with some fancy formating software or are the drives tested in some way that justifies the high price?

As I understand it, the thing that separates Glyph drives from all the other drive vendors who use the same hardware is their post-sale support: Eg., if your Glyph drive shits the bed in the middle of a session at 2:00AM, it is not unusual for Glyph to FedEx a replacement to you by 3:00PM. Sometimes even 10:00AM. THE SAME DAY!

How can they offer such spectacular customer service? By charging a lot for the hardware! It's like an insurance company: they make their nut by betting that most of their drives won't fail, and funneling the profits into incredible support for the few that do.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about this...