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A Review of the Top Four External Hard Drives
Lucas123 writes "There's a really good, detailed review at the Computerworld site on the top four external hard drives with more than 500GB of capacity. The story reveals some big flaws in the external drives, like malfunctioning one-touch backup buttons, USB 2.0 ports that don't recognize the drives, and drives coming out of the boxes unformatted. It's also an eye opener with regard to actual backup speeds. 'Broadband connections, peer-to-peer networks and larger media files coupled with new regulations that require diligence in backing up files have clearly affected the external hard drive market as drive capacities expand to 1TB and beyond. Meanwhile, the prices of those drives continue to drop, making them ever more attractive, particularly with the ease of deployment -- literally a two-minute installation, and you're ready to go. We put four of the leading external hard drives to the test. Our criteria were simple: The drives had to have multiple connection technologies (USB 2.0 plus FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 or both), include backup software and have a capacity of at least 500GB.'"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9015945
I've never heard of this brand, and for the price and all of the tests it spanked the pants off of all the rest of the drives.. I see he didn't like the quirks but it smoked the rest of them.
Why not just do it yourself? All you have to do is buy an enclosure and a drive...
-It's cheaper to buy the two separately.
-You get to pick your drive case (color, features, etc.)
-You get to pick your drive (WD, Maxtor, Seagate).
-While OEM drives often come with more than a year warranty (SG is 5 years, I believe WD is three), regular external drives often come with a one year warranty.
While you do lose a few features (I'm dying for a good enclosure w/ one button backup), it's cheaper and you have more selection. Plus, the software that comes with external hard drives is such crap anyways (Seagate and BounceBack Crippled/Express Edition).
Of course, as a slashdotter, I may not be representative of the average computer user (OK, I'm not).
Article = trap. Save your money.
I get my 500gb hard drives from new egg. Was $179 last year, down to $159 now. Maxtor Onetouch 3. Reasonably quiet (can't hear it move than a few feet away), comes preformatted. Doesn't spin down after like 5m of inactivity. Only issue is that it has an huge, annoying blinking light even when idle. I cover that with a beer can.
I just put together a 250GB USB drive a month or so ago. With a commodity $40 USB case and a $100 western digital hard-drive, I've got an awesome backup solution for my home machine. At that price (or a little better if you want a bigger disk), you can have a tremendous amount of near-line storage available to you.
:-P
Granted, my low tech solution of turning on the drive, copying files onto it, and then turning the drive off isn't as whiz-bangy as getting backup software -- but, I've been copying tar files to filesystems for a long time, so I think I can cope.
I know someone with about a terabyte of disk space in USB enclosures.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Oh look, when I put the mouse pointer over "Lucas123" my status bar says "http://www.computerworld.com". Heck, his summary even refers to "our criteria".
Go ahead and RTFA, but arm your adblockers first!
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
I'm in the process of ordering a 750 GB SATA drive and "empty shell" enclosure. That means in 6 months I can swap out the 750 GB drive when it gets full for another for just the price of the drive itself.
I always wondered why people went with the enclosures with a built in drive instead of an enclosure that is user changeable. Am I missing something?
I've purchased a few WD Passports (they're up to 160GB now), and while they seem to be meant more for personal "sync up your stuff!" use, they're not bad for backups. In their favor are the facts that they're powered by USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply) and that they're relatively small. The tradeoff is the modest capacity (I really like that we can call 160,000 megabytes "modest" -- simple pleasures for a simple mind, I suppose) and the price-for-storage (they're much more expensive per gig than the WD My Books).
TFA reviews the My Book Pro, but they also have a USB-only My Book "Essential" (read: Cheaper!) version; anyone tried those?
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Sure, the I/O speed is great but the retention? Not so good...
New punctuation update "~" (no quotes) at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. ~
Cheaper than $135 for a 500GB USB 2 drive? That is how much my Maxtor One Touch III 500GB USB2 drive cost. And by the way, why wasn't Maxtor included in this lineup? Even though it was bought up, it still produces a different (and apparently cheaper) product.
I come here for the love
Hopefully its the brands and not these specific models, as I have Iomega, LaCie, and Western Digital external drives, but in different models. My latest purchase was a 320 GB Iomega, but the 2 LaCie's are pretty new as well.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Why should we care about the bundleware backup software?
Don't look at G-tech because they blow away all of these cheaply made enclosures.
You just reminded me of Sally Field in that Boniva commercial. Quoth Sally:
Your solution may work for you, but if Americans can't even set aside five friggin' minutes a week to take a pill, I think most of us will be going with the 'whiz-bangy' solution.
Well, not being an American, I don't have to worry then, do I?
Don't get me wrong, I can see why there would be a demand for this -- most people won't know how to do their own backups.
I'm just saying, if you're even remotely computer savvy
However, I think you might be the first person I've ever seen on Slashdot quote Sally Fields. Congratulations on that.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
USB+Power enclosures for IDE and SATA drives cost about $25; USB adapters alone cost about $15. Why doesn't a single enclosure for 8 or 12 drives (with appropriate mounting screws to avoid vibration that wears drives), including a USB hub and adapters and a single sufficient powersupply, cost $50, or maybe $100? They seem to cost $300-500.
Why doesn't an 12 drive enclosure with powersupply, PIII motherboard with nothing but IDE/SATA and Gb-ethernet running Linux/RAID cost under $200?
--
make install -not war
Well, if it's designed for a Mac, it's possible that it's not formatted on purpose: first, because it's trivial to format a drive when you connect it up the first time (plug drive in, dialog comes up saying that it's not formatted, would you like to format it, click yes ... etc.), and also because there are a few filesystems that people might want.
Apple's Disk Utility offers six options to format a disk into: Mac OS Extended (HFS+), Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Journaled, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive Journaled, MS-DOS File System (FAT32), UNIX File System (EXT2?).
I guess I would assume that a "high end" HW manufacturer like Lacie would pre-format the drives to Mac OS Extended Journaled, because that's what Apple recommends as a default these days, but particularly if it's a product that's being aimed at non-clueless users, they might have just decided it wasn't worth it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What do you mean, near-line. USB speeds compare favorably with other consumer harddrive connection protocols.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The most interesting aspect of the review is that Firewire outperformed USB for every drive in every aspect of the testing. I guess some things don't change.
Does anyone know a cheap external RAID system that connects via USB 2, supports 4 or 6 HDDs and is optimized for desktop usage (ie. power-saving and silent)?
Hmmm
Some linky goodness
here
here
here
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I have a 160GB Passport drive myself, and while it's pretty cool - I do have to caution people about them. If you have an Apple Powerbook G4 aluminum as your notebook, this drive doesn't work with it. Apparently, those Powerbooks didn't provide quite enough power on their USB ports to run these. It will "sort of" spin up but never actually mount on the desktop as a drive ready to use.
I sold my Powerbook G4 15" a while back though, and now use a Macbook Pro, which works with the WD Passport without problems.
As usual, endless details on speed, and next to nothing about noise levels, power usage, and whether they have the ability to spin down when not in use.
I always go with external enclosures - far more flexible, you can put the hard disk inside a box without destroying it. You can get dual IDE/SATA enclosures as well. Most come with backup software as well. Built-in enclosures are simply an extra annoyance
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
Also, from experience, these are tough buggers. My Big Disk Extreme needed to have it's interface card replaced. The connection died on the PC, then the Mac. Had some private stuff on there, and they SAY that repair service will wipe the drive, but y'know... So, without cracking the case I gave it a go-over with a full-bore pistol-grip demagnetizer, the kind that plugs in AC, vibrates, and shouldn't run for more than 30 minutes. The drive came back in a week with a new interface card, and all my data perfectly in tact. Perfectly. Which in itself was disconcerting.
My only complaint is that despite having three interfaces, you can't have all three connected to different computers at the same time. That's just too much to ask for I guess. Time for a standalone 4-drive bay, methinks.
And although I've never done any performance testing on it, it's perfectly fast enough for its intended use on a PVR system, even configured as RAID1 (mirrored), and connected to its host iMac via FW400. I can simultaneously record from the tuner, playback on the host, and playback on a wifi peer as well, with no dropped frames. In practical terms, if it weren't for the blinkinlights, I'd never notice it was there.
Which is the way it should be.
I can see the fnords!
EWwWwWwWwWwWwWWwWwWwWwWwWWwWwWWwWwWWwWwWwW!!!
I have been looking into a nice repository for my house for a while. Even with all the cheap external drives, I still cannot beat the price of buying 4 500GB drives for $150 a piece at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16822148136. Then plug them into an old box and install Freenas. As a geek it seems to be the way to go unless you need to take the storage with you. Even then I have a VPN but now we are getting more technical than ol mom and pop would enjoy.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I got one of these 500 GB hard drives (Cavalry is the brand, I think) and plugged it into my iMac. Now if I try to put my iMac to sleep, it will wake shortly thereafter with a warning about improperly disconnecting a hard drive and how I could lose data. Even unmounting the external drive before putting it to sleep doesn't help, it still gives that error. I've looked around a bit with no luck on figuring out how to stop it doing this. Any suggestions?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Ahh, gotta love the fine reporting from Computer World. For example, I'd really like to know why the read speed is higher at the inside of the platter, since the linear velocity of the outside of the platter is much higher and as a result the manufacturer would actually have to go to a certain amount of intentional effort to make the drive read slower there.
And, as other posters have noted, it's almost always better to buy a drive and an enclosure from a place like Newegg and combine them yourself. I understand that this isn't a great option for most people, but it's well within the abilities of everyone on Slashdot and of almost everyone likely to read that article.
Computers need to explode more often.
WD Raptors and garbage.
Now, people that have garbage (running at 7200rpm) can mod me down, but nothing beats my 4 Raptors unless it has SCSI in its name.
WTF is that? A harddrive is a *block device*, period. I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole any harddrive that can "do a backup" or "display the amount of free disk space" as these are *filesystem* concepts that a block device has no business messing around with.
Before you commit to your shiny new USB/Firewire storage device, be sure you test it thoroughly. I've had several devices for whatever reason fail file checksum tests over multi-gigabytes of data. The most likely culprit is the USB interface and the drivers for them. Copy a very large multi-gigabyte tree of files back and fourth several times, checking against the master file checksums (MD5, etc). Also remember, proper checksum'ing requires that you eliminate any cache'ing that the OS may be doing, so unplug the device, then plug it back in, before running the checksum. Checksum'ing is especially important if you've formatted NTFS and the device is USB powered.
Also, even if you've verified the data is good on your storage device, moving it to another machine and connecting it up may leave you unhappy if the storage interface on the new machine isn't working properly.
You have been warned.
Since read speeds are faster on the inside tracks, a full-disk test is more accurate to judge overall speed.
Wouldn't track speeds be faster on the outside of the tracks?
"half way between n-sync and rsync"
Start Running Better Polls
Sale ends today, 500GB USB2 Seagate (the 500 version of the one reviewed) is $140 out the door, no rebates.
Very often these drives some with two USB plugs for the computer end. If your 1 USB port happens not to be able to power the thing, you plug in the other. The down side is that you take up 2 USB ports, but if you just happen to need it.. there you go.
Of course you then have to figure out still if both ports aren't just on the same controller, etc. (or even if it is a powered port - though rare these days for them not to b) but typically any USB powered port is going to have its own rated 2.5W at disposal. Won't do any good if you stick them both in a USB hub, of course.
By limiting things to 500GB+ they ruled out a ton of external HDDs, while not quite being in the niche of going to TB models either. Basically there is only 500GB and 750GB inbetween. While in the lower segment there's everything from 200GB to 450GB in increments of 50GB. But I guess it's easier to just review 4.. it's certainly cheaper; but don't they essentially get these things as loaners anyway?
..maybe I don't -want- it to be FAT32, I want it to be NTFS, or the other way around, or a different filesystem altogether. Let's say I'm a consumer, I get Iomega for recording TV shows / editing video. So I'm working with it for a while, have data on there, then I need to work with files > 4GB and I can't. Now what? I already have data on there - where do I put that while preparing to reformat the thing to NTFS? Instead, I could have gotten the thing non-formatted and walked through the formatting steps and realized that NTFS was what I'd need from the get-go.
Then by requiring multiple connections, they ruled out a ton more.. and why? Don't get me wrong, all my computers have both USB and FireWire, but I would buy for a specific one of those (most likely USB if going for something I'd want to lug around as not *everybody* has a FireWire port as of yet), not both.. it's not like I can plug the thing in both types of ports and magically expect to have double the performance? Maybe if I were in fear of either specification dying sometime soon, I'd explicitly get one with both..
'Must include backup software' is a nice one, but let's face it.. the bundled backup software is utter shite. Conner Backup Exec that came with my portable QIC-80 tape streamer was a better piece of backup software than most of these.
How about informing the user of footprint / dimensions of the thing? I have three external 3.5"'ers, and one apparently has the drive 'across' (i.e. the front of the casing sits on the side of where the HDD is), the two others are along the length. Of the two along the length, one is significantly longer than the other.
Or what about whether you can stack the things or not - in case you want to get more than one? I definitely can't stack that 'across' one - it has an odd lump to accomodate the 'one button backup' button. The others I can stack, but one of them has no 'feet', so they would sit right on top of eachother.
What about noise? Not just the harddisk itself, but the entire thing. One of the along-the-length ones has a -fan- in it. I suppose it keeps the HDD cooler, but boy does it end up making a good bit of noise! Had I known...
Instead they worry about a drive not being formatted.. *groan*
Not to mention the backup software complaints. Be glad you get any.. then ditch it and hit the web for better solutions.
Beary carefully.
Rule #1: Never pass up a pun (or should I say, "Rule number pun?").
*ducks*
If you let the domain show, why even bother? At least make an effort, otherwise it's just crappy spam.
Requires a little more upfront investment ($79 PCI card) but it makes a huge world of difference speed wise. USB is on the low-end speed-wise, with Firewire @ 400 or 800 mb/s. e-SATA is 3gb/s. So for the price of an enclosure and an off the shelf SATA drive, you can have a very nice, fast external unit that has the same bandwidth potential as your internal drives.
I noticed Maxtor InTouch external HDD, from a few years ago, had heat problems if using them for hours. The cooling and vents are inefficient. The case get very hot too. Are the newer ones better at staying cool?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...given that the actual speed of the data coming off the platters is going to be at best in the neighborhood of 650 Mb/s at the inside of the drive...down to around 300Mb/s at the outside. It's an appreciable improvement over USB, but it loses you portablity, as few computers have eSATA external ports. Hopefully they will become more prevalent in the future, as will faster drives that can utilize the interface.
That 3Gb/s figure the manufacturers all tout is bullshit.
For Ruby|Python, there's Perl.
:)
Wake me up when there's a big library like CPAN and they're really fast. Seriously, I like Ruby a lot as a language, I just can't hack things together as quickly in it as Perl. If the Perl 6 VM lets us mix & match modules across languages, so much the better.
I've argued before that somebody needs to write a Python to Common LISP compiler so we can take advantage of some really fast LISP runtimes (it's been shown by others that Python is a dialect of LISP.
I like most of the rest of your list, though
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm not a Mac user, and I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would want a case-insensitive, non-journaled filesystem.
Short answer: the Mac's filesystem was traditionally (like, forever, and the Apple II filesystem before it) case-insensitive. This led both users and software authors to make certain assumptions about file naming, and selecting/finding files. A lot of older Mac software would break if run on a case-sensitive filesystem. IIRC, some of the early versions of OS X even had problems if you tried to run them on a case-sensitive volume.
The case-sensitive flavors of HFS and HFS+ are fairly new, I think, and they've really only come out because people want to be more compatible with Unix and Linux (and NTFS, which is case-sensitive, although I don't think that Win32 really supports them).
The only reasons you wouldn't want journaling would probably be performance-related. If you wanted to extract peak read/write performance from a drive, say for temporary space while doing DV work or something, you might want an un-journaled drive. But I think it's pretty atypical. I'm actually surprised that Lacie's don't come out of the box formatted with journaling.
So the evolution of the filesystems went something like this, based on my recollection:
HFS - old, fixed-block size, barely used anymore except perhaps on removable media
HFS+ - aka "Mac OS Extended" which updated HFS, implemented 32-bit block addresses, longer file names (with Unicode I think). OS 8?
HFS+ Journaled - aka "Mac OS Extended Journaled" added journaling. Sometime after OS X came out? This was the default formatting on PPC OS X Macs, at least the last one I purchased back in early 2005.
HFSX v5 - aka "Mac OS Extended Journaled Case-Sensitive" adds case-sensitivity to HFS Plus, and apparently the format allows for additional features to follow in the future.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why not just do it yourself? All you have to do is buy an enclosure and a drive...
The chief reason is that somebody has done the work for you to validate the case and bridge board. I've gone through several external drive enclosures from NewEgg before I found one that I like. The others were too hot, had shit-for-bridgeboards (drives would drop off USB in the middle of a heavy transfer), didn't come with decent cables, et c., etc., etc. I finally found one model that does work well, and I'm running a bunch of RAID-1 and RAID-10 arrays on them.
I'm going to keep buying these Rosewill cases for now, stuffing them with Seagate SATA drives, but there's a good reason for many types of folks to buy a pre-made product..
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)