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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
Lacie has been around in the Mac world for a long time, which may explain the nice Firewire performance. It may also explain why it "wasn't formatted"... I'm speculating, but it is conceivable that it was Mac-formatted. Or not. I'm not sure who would back up to a drive without first doing a format anyway, if only to check for integrity.
Regarding the inoperable button, which is their main complaint about the drive, I'm surprised that they didn't contact Lacie support and report back... it's conceivable that it is a know issue or a bum unit. Then again, I'm rarely impressed by the reporting at Computerworld.
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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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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.
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That's a great price, but Newegg currently has that exact drive (Maxtor One Touch III 500GB) for $155. Amazon doesn't seem to have it but they have a 300GB version for $170 and a 600GB version for $417. www.maxtorstore.com is also selling the 300GB version for $170.
So, if you managed to get a deal buying it for $20 less than the already low price at Newegg then good for you, but don't pretend that that's the common going rate for external hard drives.
Still I wish windows had good support for EXT2.
Not the best, but Explore2FS is pretty nice.
Of course, writing a Windows File System is a black art. If MS documented it better, maybe there'd be more third party file systems.
You might want to look at this as well -- disclaimer, I haven't tried it, don't know how good it is.
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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.
The docs that came with the LaCie BigDisk bought by a co-worker specifically stated that it was formatted for the Mac as Mac's were the most common computers with a FW800 interface. My co-worker had no trouble re-formatting the drive for ext3 using the FW400 interface (fastest external interface on a two or so year old e-machines AMD64 laptop - we tested the interface using my LaCie). The drive has not given any troubles despite being subject to bouncing while running, powerdowns while running and other not so gentle treatment.While FAT32 does have the advantage that just about anything can read/write to it, the 4GB file size limitation (which dates back to Seattle Computer Products' QDOS original FAT implementation) really limits its usefulness for large drives. SOP for me is to re-format FAT drives with the most appropriate file system: UFS for Solaris (fun part was figuring out that I needed to use svcadm to kill vold) or NTFS for Windows XP.
I wasn't impressed by the review either.