Hard Drive Recommendations?

B

bmg

Member
I'm quickly running out of space on my mac, so am looking for an external drive.

I've used both G-Drive and Lacie drives, but now see contrasting reviews about their reliability (though that's to be expected when researching anything.)

The Toshiba drives look promising, but the same confusing reviews are scattered about.

Anyone have a favorite?
 
If you'll be moving drives around, at all, then I'd budget for an SSD if it will meet your needs. If you want a ton of storage, then you may still be looking at HDD. I've got WD (3.5") drives and I don't even remember what make of 2.5" drives in another box. Generally, if you have a good airflow around small drives or a fan for the large ones I've not had failures with drives that sit still for their entire life. (Seagate is a brand I learned to avoid way back when I worked for a computer manufacturer, but that has been some years ago, and we were only using 2.5" sizes for "laptop" computers.) I suspect the LaCie is not actually making the drives inside the cases they sell.

You don't say what the drive will be doing, i.e., are you moving audio projects to it, video, other libraries? The speed of the drive, bus/connection, and where it will be located should all figure into the criteria. I've got big spinning drives in a 2x RAID enclosure, but that has fans (required for that IMO), and so it has to go at the end of a pretty long cable to get to the closet so the fan noise is not intrusive.

p.s. If you get an external drive, you'll need to be able to back that up, too, so you really need to get 2 drives! (I use RAID 1 and cloud backup, myself.)
 
Thanks.
These will only be for storing projects as they are completed - just audio, no video.
I have a mac with a thunderbolt connection, which I guess is the fastest for this set-up.
Yes, I know I will need 2, and was thinking of a raid, but they are pretty expensive, as I see.
 
I'd avoid well priced 2.5" spinning discs in caddys. Quite often they're fake or refubs, depending where you buy.
I've seen quite a few people get a 'great' deal on cheap storage only to have the drive crap itself a few weeks in.

As Keith says, If you need something to sit on a shelf and get turned on a handful of times a year for big long term backup, then a big 3.5" spinner is the way to go.
I'm not sure the brands of mine - possibly WD - but, as said, get two.
Don't necessarily need a raid setup, although it's convenient but one way or other just have a backup of your backup.
If one fails...no big deal.

If it's for daily use and/or for moving around a lot, I'd definitely go SSD but I'd still be backing that whole thing up to a dusty spinner on a shelf once in a while.

2.5" Sata III SSDs are (relatively) cheap these days.
I tend to buy the drive and enclosure separately, rather than taking a gamble, although that doesn't apply if you're buying directly from WD shop or something like that.
 
I agree. I have 2 4TB spinners and 2 2Tb spinners just for back ups and they were dirt cheap.
 
bmg said:
Thanks.
These will only be for storing projects as they are completed - just audio, no video.
I have a mac with a thunderbolt connection, which I guess is the fastest for this set-up.
Yes, I know I will need 2, and was thinking of a raid, but they are pretty expensive, as I see.
Click to expand...

I'm gonna be a little bit of a contrarian here, sometimes what I do best :) If possible I'd emphatically stay away from any drive that spins. It just doesnt make much sense anymore. By percentages, something that spins is far more like to fail than something that doesn't.

I do audio for a living. When Covid hit most of the industry sent folks off to work from home. It was a massive IT challenge for us since we have up to 50 editors between audio and the Avids. They sent us audio folk home with a Pro Tools rig and 3 or 4 WD portable drives. One of course for backup, another for SFX libraries, one for my primary soft synth libraries, and one for use as the primary audio drive. I was skeptical at first, about running heavy Pro Tools sessions on what is after all advertised as a "portable backup" drive. Yet surprisingly, I've been retching that little drive around 10 hours a day 6 days a week with nary a hint of failure or being too slow.

If it were me (and I know it's not :) ) I'd first take a look at what exactly is filling up your Mac's internal hard drive. With the massive size of almost all computer applications these days, it's now more than ever, important that you protect that space. Even with the newer Mac's what slows things down quickest is a bloated internal drive. It was almost unheard of in days of ore to fill a hard drive with just applications. Clearly not so now. It honestly might be a good time to bite the bullet and do a fresh install of the OS while taking a good look at what you need and what you don't. Never fun but always performance rewarding. Then pick a new audio drive. I've always tended to pick smaller-sized audio drives since there's less to lose in a catastrophic failure. I'd rather have two 1-gig drives than one 2-gig drive. That used to be called the Pearl Harbor Theory :) That said so many decent drives to pick from these days with little upfront investment, it's a bit of a no-brainer. WD and LaCie (despite their legacy reputations) are great choices, and as I mentioned I've used a WD in large sessions under Titanically difficult deadlines for 18 months now. BTW: Our first two audio drives at our facility were Digidesign 9 gig drives, which, believe it or not, were somewhere in the ballpark of $1500.00 apiece.

From there I'd look at two more portable drives. One to back up your primary audio drive (on-site) and another to use for Time Machine (on-site). Finally, I'd look into iDrive (or something similar) as a cloud backup. I like iDrive because it's affordable and it's extremely streamlined in that the service only backs up computer files and it does it without any effort. IDrive will also back up your external audio drive as well, so if your projects are important to you, you'd have a 3 audio drive back up at a very reasonable cost.

Just my 2 cents and hope it helps :)
 
It depends what you're using it for, in my opinion.
I have photographer friends who backup terrabytes weekly, sometimes daily.
This is a drive going on a shelf for a rainy day. It makes no sense for that to be SSD.

In an ideal world they're never accessed again - They're insurance.
For anything that gets moved or used regularly, though, I agree. SSD is no brainer.

It's not that hard to fill a mac these days. They overcharge for larger storage so a hell of a lot of people are on 256gb
If samples and sessions are elsewhere then that's more than enough, but if you're not keeping track 256 can disappear fast.

Should say, though, the computers not going to do any significant slowing down unless you're really running out - Like, less than a gb or two left.
No computer should be in that position.
Fresh install? Horses for courses but I don't recall ever doing a MacOS reinstall.
I always found it much easier just to look and see what's taking up unnecessary space, and purge that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top