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Posted by Frank on 10/19/06 18:24
On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:42:21 -0700, in 'rec.video.production',
in article <Re: which lacie external hd to get?>,
"Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xp7rt.net> wrote:
>sgordon wrote ...
>> I've had 3 Lacie drives, two 500G Big Disks (external) and one 250G
>> external.
>> The Big Disks are both still working perfectly, but the 250G external is
>> having problems.
>
>Since (AFAIK) Lacie does not actually make disc drives, it just
>comes down to what brand/model is inside the box with Lacie's
>badge on the front. Not clear to me what value they add that is
>worth the premium price for their badge?
>Or am I missing something?
Lacie does not manufacture hard disk drives.
Aside from the make/model of drive within the enclosure -- and I have
no intention of engaging in a, for example, "Western Digital is better
than Seagate" (or vice versa) argument -- the ability of any given
external drive to function properly in conjunction with any given host
system comes down to the particular make/model of the bridge chip
within the enclosure. Some external drives, for example, use poorly
designed bridge chips and as a result the drive will lose
communication with the host system at times, such as when transferring
large (say, over 100 GB) files. This can be a very frustrating and
time consuming experience, especially when you're working on a
deadline, but even for the casual home user.
Worse yet, and I've personally seen this happen more than once, is
when a file appears to have been copied/saved correctly (that is, no
error messages appeared), but the data is corrupt. One of the tests
that I routinely perform on external hard disk drives is to copy some
large files from one of the system's internal drives to the external
drive and then perform a binary compare operation between the source
and the target files to ensure that they truly match. I've used a
number of older FireWire-attached Maxtor external drives, for example,
where the copy operation appeared to complete successfully, yet the
results of a binary file compare showed that the two files didn't
match.
I strongly suspect that not too many users take the time, trouble, and
effort to conduct a test such as that, but I wish that more users did,
as it can be a real eye-opener to know that that file that you just
copied to your external drive, perhaps for archival purposes, doesn't
match the original source file.
The other critical factor is longevity and this, in my opinion, is
almost directly related to whether or not the enclosure is fan cooled.
I can appreciate that most folks want a quiet drive, but personally I
would never buy an external drive (or a bare enclosure in which to
mount the drive of my choice) if it didn't have a fan. I've had one
too many bad experiences with external hard disk drives failing within
the first three to six months of use. In every one of these instances,
the enclosure was not fan cooled. Since I've switched to using only
fan cooled enclosures, I've not experienced a single failure, and I
sometimes have these drives in use (and I don't just mean powered on;
I mean spinning, reading, writing, and seeking) for 24 hours straight.
Lately, I've become quite partial to drives from Glyph Technologies.
I've been unable to get one to fail yet (fingers crossed), and that's
based upon close to a year's personal, hands-on experience. I also get
reports from people that Huge Systems (now part of Ciprico) makes some
decent products, although I've not yet used one myself, so that's not
to be taken as a personal recommendation.
--
Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
[Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/
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