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plasmatico · Feb 16, 2008, 10:22 PM

All my music is stored in a WD 500Gb that I bought at Costco, I bought 4 of these HDs, 3 of them failed in about 12 - 16 months time. They now have the Tb version, but as you can imaging I'd like to buy another brand...Costco is now selling Seagate that I understand carries a 5 year warranty.

2 of the WD were used to store my music and were used daily about 8 hours a day...that's a lot of spinning.

I'm still using my last WD and I need to buy a replacement to backup my 10,000+ songs before this one fails. I need a minimum of 500Gb, speed is not that important as it would be used 100% of the time to play music stored in it. Relability is the #1 concern, what would you suggest?

I also like to get an additional drive to backup my internal drive (with Time Machine) - this one will replace my third failed drive.

Thanks!

24" iMac
ATV (my source to play music through out the house)
AE

bearcatrp · Feb 16, 2008, 11:01 PM

I would recommend you check out Find the latest Performance Upgrades, Firewire and USB Hard Drives, SATA, Memory, Laptop Battery, and more at OWC and view the different enclosures they offer. I have been using Maxtor drives with no problems but since seagate bought them, am switching to hitachi drives. Heard alot of good things about theses drives. Not sure if you need just the drive or whole setup but I got one from macsales and has worked flawlessly for the past 2 years. This is what I have on my iMac OWC Mercury Elite Pro Classic Portable Solutions at OtherWorldComputing.com .

robbiejedi · Feb 18, 2008, 12:19 AM

I would probably recommend the IBM brand as the most reliable I've ever used. In one of my former jobs, we used to do a lot of data storage and backing up as well as running file and webservers and only two out of 63 of our IBM drives failed in the three years I was there.

Cheers,
Rob.

plasmatico · Feb 18, 2008, 01:12 AM

I have been reading the reviews and doing a LOT of research this weekend, and I think I will go with the Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo. Anyone has any experience to share...most important is their reliability.

IceEnclosure · Feb 18, 2008, 08:08 PM

Why not buy a case and then ANY HD you want?

seivad · Feb 20, 2008, 06:28 PM

maxtor get a good rap, and they have a 1tb media drive that you could put in via your network aswell.

tycheung · Mar 8, 2008, 02:02 PM

i liked the samsung spinpoint F1's - denser platters, means less of them and less heat and power consumption. i pair them w/ OWC mercury firewire enclosures (available at eshop.macsales.com), HD's i get from newegg.

tycheung · Mar 8, 2008, 02:03 PM

maxtor is evil. seagate bought them, and their drives went downhill ever since. any drive will go bad tho - buy a pair of firewire HD's and you can run rsync or apple backup or a softraid. or you can just buy a dedicated firewire external RAID which isn't too bad nowadays.