Portable Hard disks

[DanAbela]

Im looking to get a new portable hard disk for recording on in the range of 250gig to 500gig.
Can anyone reccomend any as ive had a lacie hard disk for bout a year and its wiped all my information twice and had to return it aswell. So i can definately say i will not be buying a lacie one again.

cheers

Dan

 

[Mulder]

Get a disk that's made for servers, like the WD raptors. Or anything that has a fiveyear 24/7 warranty. The box around it is pretty standard I guess, maybe some Macguy knows more about which firewirechip to avoid n stuff.

 

[006]

I remember there being a problem with certain firewire chips, I was looking into it when I bought my external drive, but now I don't remember. Sorry I can't help there, but thats what causes the drives to wipe themselves, or rather what causes the read/write errors. Lacie drives usually are good drives, but they seem to be hit and miss very often. Western Digital makes some really good drives, *especially* the Raptors, however, they are very expensive and only come in a 30-something and 70-something gig format. I would recommend Glyph drives. We had about 12 of them (all 80GB) at the old studio which were network accessible via optical connections to all three suites in the building. Glyph hard drives are really geared towards use with audio production. Check them out:

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/manufacturer/Glyph

Hope I was helpful.

~006

 

[DanAbela]

Il be using it with G5 and a powerbook and i never knew there were problems with the firewire chips.
thanks for the link to glyph 006, il have a look into them. Im just going through some copies of Sound On Sound and looking at prices etc. The G-Tech drives look pretty kool.

 

[006]

Those are great also. Yeah, the deal with the firewire chips...I can't give you any technical information, but I had bought an external case for my drive, and the chip that was on it...just wasn't good. Every other time I turned it on, I had to reformat it and I would lose everything on the drive, obviousely. I had posted on the DigiDesign forums because I was sure it was a ProTools problem, they told me to return the case and get one with a certain chip on it with the FireWire connections. I did what they recommended, and got the different chip...and voila, no problems ever again.

Glyph drives are like...made for recording with. They are really great drives. We had 12 of those GTKey drives (Glyph 80gb) in a couple of those GTKey rackmount chasis. Very fast setup, and not one problem either. But, that was a couple of years ago so I'm not up to date on the newest stuff out in that regard. I would definitely go with what is recommended in SoS. Good luck.

~006

 

[Mulder]

There's a 150 gig WD Raptor, just out. There's also a 400 gig WD RE2, 7200 rpm but build on Raptor mechanics. Both specified for serveruse.

I thought there was an Oxford firewirechip that was the best, although one of them had a conflict with OSX.3 (should be googleble).

I advise to buy a Raptor/RE2 and a seperate box with the best firewire Oxfordchip. The Raptor is 10k rpm btw, gives you great trackcount. Firewire adds latency, so 10k is no luxury here.

 

[006]

>.<

~006

 

[SPLASTiK]

Yeah, I'd go for a seperate harddrive and case like Mulder said... You can get a better drive for less.

Western Digital is quite awesome.