Any recommendations for an EXTERNAL Hard Drive?

nobody
Member

I am upgrading my computer and looking to purchase a reliable EXTERNAL hard drive. I have heard that Maxtor, LaCie and Western Digital were good brands. I would appreciate any comments. Looking for a 120-160 HD.

Ellen

Posted 8 years ago #
bmyers
Member
Ellen,

I use several external hard drives for my video projects.

When looking for an external hard drive, look for a drive with the following:
- 7200 RPM spin rate
- 8 meg cache
- power switch on drive case
- USB 2.0, Firewire
I use the Western Digital drives and have had no problems.

I connect via firewire, and can stack up to 56 drives from just one firewire port.

If you plan to connect via USB, be sure you have a USB 2.0 port on your computer - if you don't have USB 2.0, the access speed will be quite slow.

Find an article I wrote about this at Add an external hard drive - here's how and why you'll want to do it

Bill Myers

http://www.bmyers.com
Posted 8 years ago #
mrvideo
Member

I've been using a 120 GB LaCie external drive for about a year now, quite happily.

David Hurdon

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

I have an external Maxtor 5000 DV 160GB HDD that I have had no problems with. I use the USB 2.0 cable (it has both USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394) and I capture directly to it. It's almost silent, works perfectly, and I love it.

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

Thanks, everyone! I will look at all models and I am about to read Bill's article. I thought LaCie was pretty much used for the MAC?

Posted 8 years ago #
mrvideo
Member

I run win2k and it's perfectly happy with the LaCie.

David Hurdon

Posted 8 years ago #
nobody
Member

A firewire harddrive will work with any operating system that supports it, whether it is Mac OSX, Windows 9X, or Linux. I've been using lacie hard drives for a while with both my mac and PC, and they've (mostly) worked wonderfully. The first hard drive i bought, was dead on arival, but was quickly replaced and every drive i've bought since has been great. There are lots of other manufacturers that do an excellent job also. For external hard drives, the manufacturer does not matter as much as teh specs of the hard drive and the chipset used. You should look for:'

-Oxford 911 Chipset (or Oxford 922 if your buying a firewire 800 Drive.)

-7200 RPM

-8 MB Cache

-Seek time<9 milliseconds

if you need more help i can recommend some models.
-Alex

Posted 8 years ago #