Archive to Hard Disk - Brand?
 

HISTORY
Okay, after using 5 x 500GB Western Digital My Passport Studio FW800 hard drives to off load big projects off of our RAID, I done with them. I bought three brand new ones and 2 of them failed during archiving. My theory is that their flaw is due to the fact that they are buss powered. After an hour or so of data transfer any slight drop in power will throw an error breaking up the transfer process.

I've been using them very successfully to back up our Sony EX3 SxS footage (15-25 GB) at a time. Never had any errors using them in this way (short 10-20 minute transfers). It's only when they are transferring for over an hour or more that problems start to occur.

I've tried connecting them directly to our MacTower FW800 connection and I've tried connecting to our PCIe FW800 expansion card. I've had trouble using either connection.

Before this we used LaCie D2 hard drives but we had so many power supply problems we ditched them and switched to Western Digital (both powered and buss powered). We've never had any trouble with our AC powered Western Digital hard drives. We've got a few of them and they've been flawless. This leads me to my question....

QUESTION
What brand / model hard drive should we buy for off loading our projects to store on a shelf? What have you been using successfully?

I've narrowed it down to the following:

LaCie D2 Quadra (FW400, 2xFW800, USB2, eSATA - Single-drive - 2TB max size) $340
G-Technology G-Drive (FW400, 2xFW800, USB2, eSATA - Single-drive - 2TB max size) $380
Western Digital My Book Studio Edition (FW400, 2xFW800, USB2, eSATA - Single-drive - 2TB max size) $299.99

I've purposely picked units with only one drive in the enclosure. It just seems silly (and expensive) to put a RAID on the shelf. Transfer speed isn't that important. I can do long transfers over night. I'm currently leaning toward the Western Digital based mainly on price.

After doing a little more research (reading Amazon customer reviews) I found that:

1) LaCie is STILL having power supply problems. (I can't believe they aren't trying to get a head of this)

2) Western Digital (the powered units) also have problems mounting. One user reported that he had to re-format using the USB connection and only then would the drive mount via FW800. This is with a brand new unit. (not very confidence inspiring)

3) I can't seem to find anyone who has had a problem with G-Tech drives.

I have WDs, and they've been fine. GTech have a very good reputation and seem to earn their price premium, but I don't have any experience.

You don't mention Iomega, but just in case the idea comes up, don't touch them with whatever type of long pole is proverbial where you are (bargepole in these parts). My drive failed after less than 10 months, cost me abut $1000 to recover the data, and the first two replacements Iomega sent under warranty failed immediately.

It's extra expense & more stuff to go wrong using a complete external disk box. Just use a bare S-ATA drive in a disk dock. Newegg.com - PPA 2599 2.5" & 3.5" USB2.0 & eSATA Single Disk Docking Station - External Enclosures

There are also models where the disk lies horizontally & there may be less chance of damaging the connectors with this design. I cannot find a link on NewEgg but they are readily available here in France so I guess elsewhere too Boîtier disque dur 3.5" - FlatDock - Dock USB 2.0 et eSATA pour disque dur 2.5"/3.5" par MACWAY : Achat au meilleur prix !

You then also have the freedom to choose the brand of hard disk that you prefer for reliability. They are all much the same but once you have been burned by a particular brand then it's easy to be prejudiced.

Thanks Nick!

iOmega = BAD

What's funny is that iOmega just bought EMC Retrospect, the company that makes my long time backup software. While I was on hold with tech support, they kept hitting me up to buy iOmega hard drives for backing up data.

Just get one of these, and buy raw drives:

NewerTech Voyager Q- Quad Interface SATA 2.... (FWU2ES2HDK) at OWC

Iomega does seem to have issues! I have 4 of their firewire 800 drives, a 500MB, 750MB and a couple 1TB. Two of them will sometimes fail to mount. Another one developed a bad fan after a couple months. Haven't lost any data from them yet, but don't feel very confident about them.

I have a LOT of WD firewire 400 and 800 drives which have always worked fine.

I'll dissent from Nick - my experience with WD externals is CRAP - the MyBook series anyway. Not even for FREE would I allow another one in my edit suite. Darn thing never mounted consistently and then just failed. Within 6 months. Thankfully all that was on it was non mission critical stuff but I lost a fair chunk (nearly 500 GBs to be precise) of personal stuff that I would have preferred not to have lost (but not enough to archive PROPERLY...)

As well they spin down after a period of non-use. This is NOT user controllable but is a part of the controller firmware. Unacceptable in a media drive. If your media spans several drives and during print to tape you are pulling from another drive for an extensive period of time and the WD spins down, when the timeline gets to the part resident on the WD, it needs to spin up again - BOOM! Failed print to tape.

Save your money.

PS. My Lacies have been rock solid, from my 10 year old 80GB FW400 drives to 2 current models currently attached to my edit bay.

ADDENDUM: The spin down MAY be limited to the NON-Studio Edition drives but I would certainly make sure BEFORE buying.

I've been seriously thinking about that unit Don. The only minor issue preventing me from going that route is that I'd have to buy a few of them. Sometimes I need to have 2 or even 3 of the archive drives connected to my system. If the "drives" were all raw drives, then I'd need 2 or 3 docking stations. Not a deal breaker, but something to think about.

Thanks for the link! :)

Take a look at Firmtek's SATA system.

I archive to bare drives mounted in sleds, so the cost is about as low as you can get. The sleds are $22 each.

I'm using IBM/Hitachi SATA drives which have proven to be very reliable. I have more than two dozen of them on the shelf, been using this system for the past several years, and haven't had a single failure yet.

I had 3 Lacie, two of which failed. Sold out of Lacie, switched to G-Technology and haven't looked back. Currently, have and use 6 G-RAID2 drives with flawless results for backups, timemachine and FCP scratch disks. Will be getting a G-RAID3 as soon as I have the need to go with eSATA.

I can't say enough good about this company and their products.
Yes, you pay premium but my data is important and it means something when one of their drives is run over by a truck and still functions. That's probably the best Ad I've seen for product reliability. They're always my second stop at NAB (right after Facilis Tech).

-C

Just wanted to point out that Lacie, gtech, iomega etc. do not make hard drives. They make enclosures. They may burn in the hard drives to catch early failures,but that's it.
For actual hard drives I suggest western digital, samsung and hitachi. Seagates been having problems.

There are many enclosures that allow the easy removal of bare drives. On a mac pro you will want to add an esata card if speed is important. "Enterprise" drives cost more but are tested more before shipping. I buy the cheaper desktop drives and run them awhile before archiving.

FW enclosures are relatively expensive. There's no reason to buy the FW interface over and over. For the same cost you could archive two copies. The consevative approach is to archive two copies, each one in a pair on a different brand drive.

In the U.S. 1TB starts at about $80. Sometimes $70 on sale. Samsung is good for reliable storage price/performance. Their performance is behind a bit for permanent internal drives.

WD offers a special cable that takes care of the buss power issue... its still buss powered
but the special cable puts two buss PS's to the HD... its on their site to order...

you just have to have two USB ports..

another option is to get an express card to firewire adaptor with the power wart, it works
too.. just not as portable as one would like...

Recommend G-Tech bigtime over the other brands- especially LaCie. They are fast, reliable and worth every penny of their premium price. Unless keeping your data safe is not that important. :)

-Noah

Interesting - I have no trouble with my WDs, Shaun has lots. Whether it's down to differences in the units (quality control), or differences in working style, the conclusion should be that WDs may be a risk . Look for something else.

Don's point later on is well taken - most of the issues are around the enclosure/power supply, not the drive. My useless Iomegas used Seagates. When I took the drives out and fitted them to another enclosure, they were fine. IOW, it was the Iomega enclosure that caused the problem.

It's important to note that all the single or multi-drive enclosures that come as "plug-and-play" devices were designed for the general consumer market, not media professionals. Despite the usage claims they weren't setup for massive data I/O on a regular basis nor to be able to remove/replace the drives inside. The high usage rates are one reason LaCie's and WD "MyBook" and "MediaBook" enclosures have had higher-than normal failure rates amongst pro video users.

What every media pro needs for archiving purposes is an enclosure with hot-swappable trays in whichever connectivity is easiest for your individual setup, whether it's USB, FW or eSATA.

Contrary to common knowledge there's no benefit in using eSATA for archiving to single-drive archives because the data rate isn't that much higher - if any - than FW800. You can save the additional cost of having to get an eSATA interface (EC34 card for a laptop or PCI-e card for a tower) and stick with a FW hot-swap enclosure that will simply plug-in to your FW ports already available.

The other thing to be aware of in the archiving world is *not* to get an enclosure that attempts to control or make it's own backup solution inside controlled by hardware; it's best to handle that operation either manually or with a software backup/archiving solution that's aligned to media-pro usage.

Thanks to everyone who replied. I ordered two 2TB G-Tech G-Drives today (single 2TB drive in a quad enclosure).

Mitchell: despite my proclivity toward using LaCie drives, MANY of my clients (as a freelance editor) and colleagues/contemporaries use them with fantastic results. I don't think you have gone wrong at all.

Question for you Nick, are you using MyBook or MyBook Studios? That may well be the difference.

I have 6 of the WD MyBook drives in various sizes. Two of them are firewire 800 and the others firewire 400. No problems with any of them.

I'm sure that they are not the BEST solution and am not really recommending them. But they are reasonably priced and widely available at local big box stores. When I want a hard drive I usually want it NOW, so I settle for whatever I can find locally at a decent price.

I have used the MyPassport FW 800 WD (and other WDs) and I´m very happy with them.
I´m foremost a cameraman and don´t edit that much though. I have used the portable FW800 WD quite a bit for location editing though

I have been very happy with G-tech drives (though both of mine spin down, which is annoying sometimes). What about Glyph drives for externals? At one time at least, they were big in the audio recording world.

Just the MyBook. Maybe there's a difference in batches - maybe they changed the electronics?