FW800 External Hard Drives

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

What do you guys recommend? I recently got the Seagate GoFlex FW800 drive, but it crapped out on me after less than a month. It got bad reviews on Amazon but I thought I would give it a try considering the throughput on it with the Thunderbolt adapter was amazing. I'm looking into Western Digital but I really wanted to stay with Seagate because before this they've been amazing for me.

I'm looking for at least 2TB. Maybe $200-300 range. It would be nice if it could be upgraded to Thunderbolt, but it's not too much of a big deal.

 

[secretanchitman]

weird, because i have the 3TB version which i got from best buy during black friday. got the firewire 800 adapter for $30 bucks and its been surprisingly reliable (using it right now actually).

my other external besides a usb 2.0 vantec nexstar, is a macally G-S350SUAB2. its a 3.5" enclosure that has usb 2.0, esata, firewire 400 and *two* firewire 800 ports. it has also been rock solid for me. the original version (G-S350SUA) didnt have enough power to drive 1.5TB+ hds because they used more juice apparently, but the UAB2 is just fine. i got mine on sale from amazon for around $45, and stuck a 1.5TB drive inside it.

havent seen many (cheap) thunderbolt drives, and it looks like we'll have to wait until it gets somewhat adopted on the windows side to see the prices go down. otherwise we have only seagate, wd, and the lacie little big drive for thunderbolt drives...

 

[whiteonline]

I have the WD My Book Studio II for a bit over a year. Haven't had any problems with it and it runs pretty regularly, partitioned for time machine and general storage. I have the 2TB model, but run it RAID1, so only get 1TB space (you can run JBOD at 2TB). They offer 2-6TB.

There is also the Studio (no roman numerals) that is single drive in 1-3TB. Assuming the same performance.

The benefit of the Studio II is it is dead simple to change out a disk if one goes bad (WD Green drives).

 

[Rottie]

Strange..I never had any problem with 500GB Seagate GoFlex for Time Machine with both USB 3.0 and FW800 upgrade adaptors.

 

[PCTC2]

I have a Hitachi ProDrive (1TB) and it has been extremely reliable over the past year and a half (lots of read and writes per day too). It's been hooked my to my Mac Mini Server for NetRestore/NetBoot, and general file storage. I prefer to use mostly Hitachi drives and to be honest (I have owned A LOT of drives), they have been the most reliable, followed closely by Seagate and Western Digital. I think right now, the most read-write heavy drives are my Hitachi DeskStars and Seagate 7200RPM drives and (knock on wood) only 2 have died over the past 3 years.

Fry's has the Hitachi ProDrive Quad 4TB (2TB+2TB) for $250. You could use your Mac to do either RAID0 (stripe) for 4TB or RAID1 (mirror) for 2TB with more data security from a single drive failure.