Matthew, that LaCie unit is indeed 2x500GB drives. Read the reviews at the Apple Store or over at Newegg and other places. Or just the specs at LaCie's web site. Their 2TB Bigger Disk Extreme is 4x500GB drives in one enclosure.

Hitachi is still the only one shipping 1TB hard drives. They were announced as available back in December, but supply has been extremely limited. PC vendors like Dell haven't been able to get the quantities to actually offer them in production systems until now.

Seagate also has 1TB drives ready to go and should be shipping them within the next few weeks. I know Maxtor has announced them as well, but don't know when we can expect them. I have yet to see any real-world benchmarks and reports of the 1TB drives. Either Anandtech or Tom's had a brief review of the Hitachi unit within the last 60 days, but it was rather brief. Price on these drives is MSRP $399. Look for street price from most online vendors to be ~$370 and commonly available here in about another 2~4 weeks.

Is Seagate still going to run Maxtor as a separate entity? I figured Maxtor would go away after Seagate acquired them.

-gb-

I expect that the Maxtor brand will stick around. They're typically a bit cheaper than Seagates and don't have as strong a warranty.

I have no idea which parts and factories apply to the two brands though. It's probably pretty fungible by now.

Larger drives are faster because they have a higher density of data per drive platter. For a 2TB mirror, you are better off getting two 1TB drives than four 500GB drives, unless you can run RAID0+1.

So, there we go, size matters. Don't tell the missus;)

Two words....SOLID STATE DRIVE, ok that's three...

The link you pointed at is two disks. the 2 TB version you mentioned is 4 disks. Just to remind you, LaCie has a rather bad reputation in terms of reliability. In addition is only has fire wire and USB interfaces, which for me would be unacceptably slow.

Hmm, thanks for the heads up on Lacie. Didn't realize they had a bad rep.

Actually LaCie has a rather good rep and a surprisingly strong following... Considering most of their products are grossly overpriced and kinda suck. They market themselves mostly to the pro graphic design and imaging industries, more so to Mac users and I think that's where they get some of their pro image and reputation. However, I have never used or owned a LaCie product that I was truly pleased with. They have been marketing a lot more to the general consumer over the last year or two and their business has been picking up I guess, but I still don't understand where they get so many loyal customers and people who praise their products.

LaCie, for me, was a mixed bag, but I think that's common with most drives. I love Fantom and G-Tech, though we had three G-Drives go down at the same time. Same with LaCie.

But those may have been isolated. Because new G-Drives and both older and newer LaCies have done well for me, and also where I work.

Drives will eventually fail, esp. if they're bumped to the floor, which happened to our LaCie.

Heath

I think the title of this thread should be something else other than what it applies. It's a tad misleading :)

Bill

I think that's why they're called threads: as in, they weave:)

It was in reference to drives that "run" at 1TB. When I first saw the title of this thread, it read as if there's new drives that have a 1TB per sec transfer rate.

run doth not equal capacity :D

Bill

Well not to defend LaCie or the other brands, but since they will use off-the-shelf hard drives, some portion of the failure rate can be attributed to the hard drive manufacturer. That said, poor thermal exchange (and not manufacturing defect) is probably the number one cause of consumer drive failure. LaCie and others may have built their device without engineering proper heat dissipation.

If you dig around for the report from Google on drive failure (they have a LOT of drives) they found no correlation between drive temperature and failure. Nor did they find any one that was better or worse than others. What they did find was the typical bathtub curve, if it doesn't fail early in it's life due to a manufacturing defect, it'll almost certainly last quite a long time until it wears out. This is pretty typical of most thing, particularly electromechanical devices and kind of makes those MTBF figures a bit misleading.
NAS devices are very cheap these days, we have just bought the Thecus 5200 with 5x400G Samsung drives in RAID 5 and so far liking it a lot. We could have fitted 5 x 1TB drives but the $/GB was best on the 400GB drives.