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which is preferred. I can get a maxtor a little cheaper. are they the same quality?

La Cie are very reliable and probably worth the extra

Originally posted by Slickie:
which is preferred. I can get a maxtor a little cheaper. are they the same quality?

I've got a lot of drives. The quietest drive I have is a new Maxtor (180GB). Prior to that, the quietest drive was the Glyph (80GB). The loudest drive I own is a LaCie (120GB).

My LaCie drive is louder than every other piece of gear I own, all put together. It drowns out everything else in the room. I keep it off except for when I need it. I bought a similar drive for a client in Las Vegas. It was also loud. I'm thinking maybe LaCies are just loud. But that doesn't mean they're no good. Just loud.

In my case, loud = undesirable. So, I tend to go with the drives that are quiet.

My oldest external Firewire drive is a Western Digital 60GB. It is relatively quiet, and has been running over 5 years without a hitch. The next/oldest is a Que (60GB), which is 4 years old. It still runs fine, and is also very quiet. In fact, it's as quiet as the Glyph. But I keep it off most of the time, because I'm not using it for day-to-day purposes. It has the distinction of having fallen on the floor from high places twice while operating during its life. Still runs just fine. So, I can vouch for the reliability of all these drives. That seems to be not a major factor these days. Since they all seem to last a long time, I go for the quiet ones. LaCie's drives are noisy, so currently they're on the bottom of my list. My Maxtor is so quiet I literally cannot tell when it's running. You can barely hear it access if you get close to it.

Oh, one other thing: all my drives are 7200 RPM, and they're all very fast! I didn't include the others, but basically more of the same, and some internal IDE ATA drives, too.

Shooshie

<small>[ August 05, 2005, 04:43 PM: Message edited by: Shooshie ]</small>

Actually, LaCie doesn't make drives. Maxtor does. LaCie integrates other manufacture's drives into enclosures and adds whatever external interfacing you want. For example, their CD-RW products are mostly based on Sanyo CD-RW. It could even be that LaCie uses Maxtor drives...

Originally posted by qo:
Actually, LaCie doesn't make drives. Maxtor does. LaCie integrates other manufacture's drives into enclosures and adds whatever external interfacing you want. For example, their CD-RW products are mostly based on Sanyo CD-RW. It could even be that LaCie uses Maxtor drives...

It's the fans in their enclosures that make so much noise. They must use the cheapest fans. Or the most powerful.

Shooshie

i own both. both are reliable. i had a lacie 200gig take a dump on me. (and yes, it smelled)

One thing that is very nice about the LaCie d2 drives is they can be rack mounted - 2 to a rack space - with an additional mount. Nice touch. I've been using the the FW800 triple interface d2's with no problems, but they are for backup. I know others using Orange Micro as working drives and really like them.

I'm assuming FW external? I think it depends on what you're going to use it for. If it's for archive, I don't think it really matters about noise or speed, (only turn it on when you save). If it's for VI libraries or recording, you should check out a new company called G-Tech. They've got some RAID configgured FW drives (G-RAID) which although are expensive, they are Raptor fast, come in all sizes and look like miniature G5's! Extremely high speed & quality.

with only 3fw ports, how are all you hooking up all your FW drives?

Originally posted by wonder:
with only 3fw ports, how are all you hooking up all your FW drives?

Daisy chain. Just one after the other. I've got most of the drives on one port, and a couple others on the same port with the 896 Audio interface. Those are backup drives, and don't share audio with the interface.

Shooshie

actually I only have 2 FW ports and 1 is taken by the recordding interface - the other will be taken by the HD

good idea!

The newer LaCie D2 Drives have only one firewire 400 connector making Daisy chainging a bit of a nuisance. Out of two of those, two had their firewire bridges burnout and required a couple hundreds dollars for data recovery. The previous versions of D2 cases had two fw 400 connectors and (touch wood) didn't burn out (so far). OWC has a mercury elite in a plastic case that is quiet (no fan- for better or worse) and out of probably 15 of those 2 blew their firewire port- but the data was recoverable via their USB port, which was not the case with the LaCie (which eats up time as well as money). The OWC 120 drives still use the drive they have used for a couple of years successfully. Like LaCie they stuff drives in their enclosures. It seems like drive reliability is not strictly one manufacturer or another, but is subject to what patch of parts they are using.
OWC appears to have a significant client base of audio/video users so they might be responsive to correcting drive problems in a way that Maxtor or Lacie who sell larger portions via CompUSA or Applestore to consumers who buy one drive every couple of years where it won't make so much difference if quality control or design slips and loses some customers as if they are catering to clients who buy dozens of drives a year. Maxtor and LaCie may have drives for big clients- but are they the same and go through the same QC as the one you will buy? For a year or two D2's seemed good (touch wood) but whether they have scrapped the ones with the high failure rate Firewire bridge or not?
Glyph's may be OK, but it looks like 200% more cost fo 20% improvement. Maxtors frequently get unfavorable comments on digidesign duc, though some people have done OK with them.
The OWC's could always have a bad production run, though for about 3 or 4 years they's seemed pretty consistant. The Seagate and the IBMnowHitachi drives are pretty proven so you might consider asking for those models (different sizes have different drives in their cases) for proven reliability. All 7200.

If you want maximum performance a SATA Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm drive probably will do more tracks than anything, but at a high $ to gigabyte ratio (maximum 76gig) and a lot of heat to dissipate-generally important to longevity of electronics.

PS OWC = Other World Computing .com
aka
"MacSales.com"

<small>[ August 05, 2005, 11:36 PM: Message edited by: spirit ]</small>

I'm currently using two EZquest 250 gig Pro A/V firewire 400 drives. They are 7200RPM, fanless and very quiet, and have 16MB buffers. They are stackable and smaller than most other drives.

I've used EZquest drives in my studio for years with no problems or failures. If I ever have a question, I can get their tech guys down in San Diego on the phone right away which is a nice perk.

Over the years, I've tried most of the other drives and always am happiest with the performance of the EZquest drives. I do agree that the 10K drives are nice but expensive and generate noise and heat.

Originally posted by Slickie:
which is preferred. I can get a maxtor a little cheaper. are they the same quality?

I have had many many many Maxtor drives fail. i will never buy another one.

Best drive brands for me have been hitachi/ibm Deskstar, seagate, and western digital.

I either install them internally or in an external firewire case, such as this:

http://www.dealsonic.com/bytme3idetof.html

that's a firewire 400 case, but they have firewire 800 cases too.

That being said, LaCie is a great manufacturer of external hard disks -- check out their refurb and clearance pages:

http://www.lacie.com/products/clearance/

<small>[ August 06, 2005, 08:14 AM: Message edited by: emulatorloo ]</small>