External Hard Drive

[Bob D]

Well, I'm ready to seriously decide on an external hard drive. My important criterea, beside the obvious of reliability, is it be quiet.

I'm currently focused on the Seagate Freeagent (Desktop or Pro) at 750GB. My question to this group, considering I'm sure that many have been using external drives for a while, is what are your experiences with this set of external hard drives(Seagate) or any others? Connecting via USB or firewire is fine for me, I don't need to go the eSATA route.

Bob D

[Gooder]

Hi Bob D,

For me, I like my WD USB 2 drive as it has a power on/off switch located right at the front! Also, the WD drive will power down, on system shut off and sleep mode etc.

My other drive which is a Segate Basic has no power switch and that has to be safely ejected from the system and then switched off from the mains! Both are fairly quiet and I have had no problems with them!

Hope it helps,
Lee

[Chuck Engels]

I have a few Seagate drives and like them but my favorite has got to be the MyBook.
For the price it is a great external drive but don't waste your money on the more expensive Premium version, the Essential version will do just fine
There is no reason to get an external drive with Firewire for the extra money you will spend, only USB is perfectly fine.

Amazon has the 750 Essential for $180 and the 1TB model for $240
Staples is having a sale, the 500GB MyBook is only $125, the 320gb is only $90

[Gooder]

Forget to mention that my WD Drive is ndeed a "Mybook Drive"
One things to note is that my Drive came as FAT32 so you may need to re-format!

Lee

[Chuck Engels]

One things to note is that my Drive came as FAT32 so you may need to re-format!

I have 9 external drives, every one of them was formatted FAT32.

[Maxine370]

I love my Seagates. I have both standard which are always hooked up and run fairly quiet. They are in my bedroom and are alwasy on even when we sleep so they must be relatively quiet (however we live in NYC which is quite noisy so I say relative). Daisy chained firewire and I keep my captured video there and use it in my Premiere projects with no noticable slowdown or problems. Also serves as the rendered files cache.

My other is the Freeagent which is I use to archive. Only hook up (USB) when adding files or retireving old files. No problems.

I think nowadays if you go with the FreeAgent or Mybooks you get a good quality/fair priced drive that will give you little problems.

[Gooder]

Not sure I understahnd what you are trying to say, Chuck
Yes, my drive was Fat32 so I had to re-format it to NTFS for video work!

Cheers,
Lee

[Bob D]

Are the WD drives fan cooled? Are they quiet?

How long have you all had your drives? Have they been reliable?

Thanks for the heads up on being delivered as FAT32 format.

[Chuck Engels]

Lee, just saying that any drive you get will most likely be formatted FAT32.

Bob, Some of my drives are at least 3 years old, none of them are fan cooled.
Drives in your computer case are not fan cooled either, and they are building the cases and drives so well now it isn't necessary.
My oldest drive gets pretty hot, you can tell the difference between that one and the newer ones.
I have not had any problems with any of my external drives, ever.

The MyBooks run very quiet and are very cool (temperature wise)

[Gooder]

Are the WD drives fan cooled? Are they quiet?

No, I don't think my WD mybook drive is fan cooled.

How long have you all had your drives? Have they been reliable?

No problems with them and I have had the WD Mybook for about 1 year. That drive is used for offline backups, photos, documents etc.
The Seagate Basic is only 3 months old and is used 24 hours a day, I can't sleep, I just keep editing!

Thanks for the heads up on being delivered as FAT32 format.

My pleasure
The new MyBook drives may come as NTFS, not sure about that though. Chuck, might be able to answer that one!

Lee

[Gooder]

Chuck did answer that one
He is quick

Lee

[Gooder]

Bob D,

I think on the new drives from WD (MyBook) they have a neat capacity gauge feature. You can see on the front of the drive just how much space you have left etc.

Not sure which model but here is the link to the main site!
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/

Cheers,
Lee

[rustysterling]

Another plug her for the WD drives. I have two that I've been using for more than a year. In fact, I've used both to hold my video project files while editing. No problems with speed, latency, or heat. But you do have to reformat/convert to NTFS from FAT32.

[Bob D]

Thanks everyone. I'm searching for the best deal on WD Essential. So far Circuit City has a 750GB for $179 (includes tax). The Staples one (500G) for $124 sounds enticing, but I would fill that up right way. i suppose I could buy 2! I'm holding off pulling the trigger until I get home. I swear there is a Staples coupon laying around the house somewhere.

[Bob]

Lee, just saying that any drive you get will most likely be formatted FAT32...Drives in your computer case are not fan cooled either, and they are building the cases and drives so well now it isn't necessary...

I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus a few months ago to replace an old Seagate that died without warning. (Got it on sale at a price I couldn't refuse ) Seagate owns Maxtor and the drive has a 5 year warrenty, so I thought why not give it a try. Looks good so far. It came formatted in NTFS and has firewire and usb ports. Convection cooling, but the case doesn't appear to get hot. No power switch, but the drive is not spinning when the port is disconnected, the pc is powered down, or pc power management has turned it off. Very quiet.

My desktop computer (minitower) has fans to cool the internal disk drives. The fans make a real difference in how cool the drives operate.