Hi all - I want to buy a couple of 2TB drives to use with my laptop which has firewire and USB 3.0 - I will be wanting to edit the footage on the drives - they won't be just for storage - any recommendations?

Well I use the WD My Books. I have two 1Tb drives and two 2Tb drives, all USB3 and surprisingly fast. I have actually lost one of them, in all fairness, but they are very effective, and usable in most workflows.

You may want to consider something like this: Plugable| Plugable USB3-SATA-U3 USB 3.0/2.0 SATA Hard Drive Docking Station (ASMedia 1051E Chipset) (http://plugable.com/products/USB3-SATA-U3)

The increase in versatility one of these provides is quite astounding.

Basically, you have just one (or in your case, two) docks but as many "bare bones" hard drives as you need, if you check the "gigabyte per pound" figure in the UK you can save a bundle by just buying the drives that give the most bang for your buck.

Something like this should be in the running I reckon: Seagate ST1000DM003 Barracuda | Seagate (http://www.seagate.com/au/en/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/barracuda/#)

In case this option hasn't passed you way before, the drive simply plugs into the top of the "toaster", just like a slice of bread, you hit the power switch and hey, presto, a new drive on the system.

Finished with the drive? Simply hit the "Detach connected hardware" icon bottom right of your screen, wait till it gives you the ok, then power the dock down and remove the "toast" from the "toaster".

Slot in another drive for a second/ third or fourth application and off you go again.

Should be pretty quick on a USB 3 connect.

They're magic for doing rolling backups, which is what I use mine for.

Think of it as 1 TB floppy discs, but ONE HECK of a lot faster!


CS

Chris I've never seen these before - I'll see If I can find a UK supplier - I was looking at Seagate Expansion 2TB drives but cannot determine the RPM - even Seagate don't know - here is there response to my question

"we cannot determine the speed of a hard drive inside and external enclosure. when it comes to external hard drives, the internal speed "5400-7200" does not matter, since they are designed to operate at USB2.0 or USB 3.0 speed."

To quote a well known phrase or saying: What utter cobblers!

Every drive is quite clearly marked with its rotational speed, the one I pointed you to yesterday is most definitely 7200 rpm.

The speed of an external drive is no less relevant than the speed of an internal drive, especially as USB 3 is pretty well the same interface speed as Sata 3.

I am not, however, suprised at what you reported them saying, it is not the first time Seagate have opened their mouths and instantly stuck both feet straight in.

Just to expand on my comments on docking stations, a trawl of the net will quickly throw up that they can be had with (just) about any interface known to man, a Thunderbolt is on the way as I type.

Some only have one, some two, some 4 (though I'm struggling to remember what the 4th is).

As I said yesterday, do investigate the cost per gigabyte of the available drives on the market, here 1 TB is by far the best bang per buck, so, in effect, you can buy 3 X 1 TB drives for the same price as 1 X 2TB drive, or pretty close.

Do make note that although most** of the docking stations will take up to a 4 TB drive, Windows XP limits any hard drive partition to 2 TB, so you're on a bit of a hiding to nothing buying larger than 2 TB if running that OS.

** = Some will only take a max 2 TB drive. Check.

Oh, and all the docking stations I have investigated will take both 2 1/2" and 3 1/2" drives.


CS

based on my experience, i do NOT recommend WD MyBooks; neither will play nicely on my USB 3.0 slots (Rampage III Gene; everything else works fine) and they BOTH have a habit of dropping out and i have to power cycle them.

However, if one were to buy them and gut the hard drives, i can say the bare drives themselves are perfectly reliable. sadly the external USB 3.0 ones i purchased were cheaper than internal 3TB drives.

Every failed external drive I have ever purchased was a WD MyBook... so I stopped. LaCie exclusively in my edit bay right now. I've had 2 power supplies fail but no drives.

Your mileage may vary.

Seems it does Shaun and not because we're over 14000 miles away :)

All our drives are WD 7200rpm, never had a real problem. Basically I don't think the WD external drives have enough internal cooling.
Probably a size, noise and cost thing and over long sessions the internal heat does build up.

Even though the post studio has good aircon, we run additional fans.

Cheers.

Allan that's an interesting point about the WD externals and heat. I've mentioned losing one of my four WD USB3 externals, and they are all lined up cheek to cheek in a row, and do get a bit warm sometimes.

Good gracious. I just peeped behind the big monitor that hides those drives, and there was a box sat right across the top of them, completely blocking the vents! They are not at all warm at the moment, but they would obviously warm up when used.

Trevor, good catch :) Leave as much space as you can, minimum 5-6cms between each drive.
And if anyone else uses the room, check everything before powering up.

A poorly designed enclosure can drive the heat up. Despite the cooling arrangements
and testing it by placing your hand on it, that won't tell you how hot it is inside the drive.

The first clue some get is a faint burning smell, even before the drive malfunctions.

And Murphys law says it'll drop dead the day after the warranty runs out.

Cheers.

Basically I don't think the WD external drives have enough internal cooling.
Probably a size, noise and cost thing and over long sessions the internal heat does build up.

As well, the WD MyBooks I had made no allowance to keep them from spinning down. After a period of no access, they would spin down regardless of power management settings, which pretty much made them useless as media drives (most of my work is long form). Not sure if WD has made any changes to the firmware to avoid drive spin down in recent releases...

i've had a Lacie Big Disk Extreme 1T (replaced power- still doesn't work...) and a Lacie Rugged 500gb fail. That's close to $1000 for two bricks. And a Keiser 500gb failed. and another 250gb that i forget the brand.
Pretty frustrating and some data trapped or lost. Unfortunately i have 4 other Lacie Ruggeds full of data that i no longer trust.
I am now trying out a Glyph portagig which 'seems' solid and has a fan. I also have two iomega 500gb that have outlasted the Lacie 'professional' drives. that said, i am finding it harder to trust any drive...
would love to know what the rate of failure is for hard drives and if there is an 'expiry date'???

Every drive is quite clearly marked with its rotational speed, the one I pointed you to yesterday is most definitely 7200 rpm.



Guess what? The WD Green series do not have speed ratings, but are said to go 'up to 7,200' depending on the requirement. I burned a hole through the wrapping trying to find the speed rating on it.

I have never had a WD drive fail on me, nor a Sandisk drive. For moving around, I highly recommend Sandisk shockproof drives, I even like the finish.

Basically, you have just one (or in your case, two) docks but as many "bare bones" hard drives as you need, if you check the "gigabyte per pound" figure in the UK you can save a bundle by just buying the drives that give the most bang for your buck.

Where I live external USB HDs cost less than bare bones internal drives. I guess the reason is related to a high number of warranty covered returns on internal drives. Either that, or maybe the external drives grow on trees and it takes the manufacturer additional labor to crack the shells open to get the bare drives out!

I bought an SATA to ESATA bracket for about $3. This allows the internal SATA ports in the computer to be used with external enclosures that have ESATA connectors. It works great for video.

i am finding it harder to trust any drive...would love to know what the rate of failure is for hard drives and if there is an 'expiry date'???

My experience is about 1 out of 5 disks fail within 5 years. I had good luck with 250GB drives purchased a few years ago and with 2GB drives from ages ago, but not nearly such good luck with recent 1TB drives. Keeping a disk running at a constant temperature seems to increase the life expectancy.

My experience is that drives most definitely fail more often than in early days when they had much reduced capacity. It occurs to me that it is such an obvious question, there is bound to be data out there, and a quick Google found multiple links:

Study: Hard Drive Failure Rates Much Higher Than Makers Estimate | PCWorld (http://www.pcworld.com/article/129558/article.html)
Google’s Disk Failure Experience (http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/)
Hard Drive Failure rate by manufacturer? - Hard-Disks - Storage (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283125-32-hard-drive-failure-rate-manufacturer)

(way more out there)

I can remember a drive failing in a lab workstation before I retired, which would have been >20 years ago. We had sufficient warning to rescue the data. other than that, I think I might have lost a drive in one of my systems way back, but am not entirely sure. More recently I have lost two of the ten drives in my current system in just over a year, and one of those was a 1st generation Velociraptor, which supposed to
among the most reliable of HDDs. I wouldn't dream of trusting data to a single source nowadays. Not for a moment!

[edit] having just read my own links, the Google study (second link) is particularly interesting. For instance they found no correlation between HDD temperature and failure rates. I can remember a few anecdotal supposedly true stories about drives you probably wouldn't trust as forts choice. The Hitachi Deskstar drives that became known as Deathstar drives on the forums comes to mind. Seagate were thought to be more reliable than Western Digital drives not so long ago, and both my failures were with WD drives. Hard data has to be king in these situations though.

the failure rate of other equipment is also disconcerting as well as expensive and a pain in the butt.
as well as the hard drive failures i've had:
Dell U2410- pink tint, but bought for CC.
iMac 17" screen lines.
Lacie firewire lightscribe burner-fail.
smallHD DP6- power failure/warranty repair.
API A2D- power button broken on brand new shipped unit.
iMac superdrive fail.
Matrox mini- does not calibrate monitors for CC as advertised, the reason i bought it.

i understand that working in this field with a lot of high tech items that problems happen... but product failure and design flaws on items that cost so much hard earned money is really frustrating, and looking on many forums to solve my own problems, it seems that they are more the rule than the exception (ie: look up screen problems with many different iMacs!). i wonder if standards are lower on everything? and don't get me started on the difficulties of dealing with apple or dell or lacie or matrox who often refuse to accept responsibility or make amends.
or maybe i'm just a whiner...

I hear you there; that and buggy firmware/drivers/software.

LG 24" LED LCD monitor, DOA
Seagate 802.11 1TB HDD failed
two WD Black 500GB HDD's failed
Datavideo DN-60 HDV to CF recorder (all firmware related issues)
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD5 failed after 1 month, replacement was DOA, switched to ASUS
Sparkle GTX 2xx was DOA
HP Lightscribe DVD burner screwed up several dozen discs
Anything by Belkin is a nightmare
Manhattan LCD 8.9B backlight failed
Apevia Aqua 700w PSU power switch broke; replacement ran under 3V and 12V
-Apevia then sent me two replacement PSU's, so i wired them together and use both in the HAF932

Had better luck with Samsung monitors and HDD's over LG monitors, and Samsung HDD's over WD's. The MyBook series randomly drop out or shut off, though the drives themselves are fine. I ripped them all out and made them internals or nude externals.

Also Adobe CS5.0 was the most stable release on my machines; 5.0.2 was TERRIBLE, skipped 5.5 and so far 6.0 has been only decent; keeps switching scratch disks to C instead of RAID array every startup.

The MyBooks cost less than the WD drives bare; which is insane.