External Hard Drive Round-Up

There comes a time when you’ve eaten up your whole MacBook Pro’s hard drive with all sorts of stuff. Downloads from iTunes, podcasts, stock photo images, project files, whatever. Honestly, I don’t really know how I could have used up 100 Gigs so fast, but oh well, that’s how it goes.

Since I’m working with digital audio most of the time, I need a reliable drive to either work off of or move files to once I’ve finished. Drive space has gotten remarkably cheap over the years, and if this was for my desktop box I’d probably just slap another hard drive in the case. Since my laptop is my main “axe”, and I’m less comfortable fiddling with the innards of a laptop (and much less comfortable paying Apple to do it for me), I figured an external drive is the way to go.

My Criteria

• Fast drive–7200RPM or better
• At least 500 gigs of space
• Firewire 800 connection (or better)
• Reliable company with a good reputation
• QUIET. This device must be quiet and must not throw off all sorts of errant RF signals or have a loud fan

Initially I thought firewire 800 might be the best I can do for data transfer speeds. In digging around I found out there’s something called eSATA; this basically will allow you to connect your external drive at speeds that are supposed to rival that of an internal drive. That’s pretty hot.

The Contenders

Western Digital and Seagate had good reputations for reliable hard disks when I used to poke around with desktop hard ware, so I thought they might be a good choice.  The Western Digital My Book Studio appeared to be a decent choice. I’ve read some reviews (which for the life of me I can’t find links to for now–ugh) that have said the drive is prone to failure, and the unit can run loud. Yeesh. Since silence is one of my critical issues, it’s on to the next drive.

LaCie seemed to be the darling of the Mac community for a while–the design studio hard drive of choice. These devices seem to get good reviews, and the LaCie d2 Quadra in particular looks like it might serve well. But my one real-life experience with a LaCie drive was not good; it made the most horrible high-pitched whining sound. Whether this was an issue with that particular drive or with all LaCie drives, I’m not sure. But I’m hesitant to mess around with a pricier brand that might raise such a racket.

Finally, one of the guys at the Mac Store pointed me to the G-Tech G-Drive Quad. I’d never heard of G-Tech, but it’s fanless design (and the guy’s rave review) caused me to take a closer look. It has all the connectivity choices I wanted, and reviews seem to be good. The only downsides I see are 1) they are quite a bit pricier than other brands and 2) they apparently are hard to come by.

The Decision

I plan on purchasing a G-Tech G-Drive. If the extra $$ translates to a reliable, quiet drive then it’s well worth it I think.

Does anyone have experience with these or any other drives they care to share? Let me know.

Tags: hard drives, hardware

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Web & Technology.
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