Which external HD- Lacie or WD?

[Medic1]

I am looking at getting a 1TB external hard drive to back up my photos. Both ones I am looking at right now are 1TB. 1 is a Western Digital and 1 is a Lacie. Both are the same price.

From what I can see, both are external power supply. Is it better to have USB powered?

Reading some reviews I have seen alot of people saying that both the WD and Lacie drives are prone to failure, but alot more people saying they are reliable.

Any advice or recommendations? Thanks

[MaxxuM]

Either would be fine, but I prefer LaCie Rugged drives for field work. I've gotten my two wet, muddy, dusty and dropped them a few times and they still keep going. You should pay more attention to the model and not the maker. Look at reviews on Newegg and at Amazon and see what people are saying. I have Hitachi, WD Scorpio and SG drives in my 2.5 enclosures as well as my three family laptops and none have failed; even under very heavy usage.

[bryan k]

I have 4 WD MyBook Externals (2 years old), 1 WD Passport (3 years old), and 3 old LacIes (3.5 years old). No problems with any of them... Granted I don't give them much abuse (and they aren't on all the time), but happy with all of them all so far.

My WD passport is USB powered which is great to use with a laptop or when I ened to bring it back and forth between work and home. At home, all the drives I use have power supplies attached.

I assume the "plug powered" drives normally run a bit faster, but I have no facts or evidence to back up my assumptions...

[Medic1]

Either would be fine, but I prefer LaCie Rugged drives for field work. I've gotten my two wet, muddy, dusty and dropped them a few times and they still keep going. You should pay more attention to the model and not the maker. Look at reviews on Newegg and at Amazon and see what people are saying. I have Hitachi, WD Scorpio and SG drives in my 2.5 enclosures as well as my three family laptops and none have failed; even under very heavy usage.

Well, these most likely won't be going too far from my home workstation. I just want these to back up any important image files off my hard drive.

The WD drive is the 1TB MyBook Essentials. I did check the reviews on Amazon before I posted, and thats where I found that about 20% (115 out of about 600 reviews) of the reviewers reported catastrophic failures of the HD and poor customer service with warranty work

The LaCie Drive is the 1TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Drive. Amazon had alot less ratings on this product but approximately proportional number of poor ratings as the WD drive

I just thought I would get general opinions on reliability of these brands from POTN members

[MaxxuM]

The WD avg is still four stars - not bad really. If you wished to analyze the reviews you may find that some people were being unrealistic in their expectations, the bad reviews may have been grouped at one time to reflect a bad batch (dropped shipping crate) plus some reviewers that meant to place more than one star but accidentally pushed one. I always add the *+** and ****+***** and see what I think then.

[Medic1]

Thats a good point. Well, if I do decide to go with WD that'd be a big advantage to me as I have store credit at a local retailer who only carries WD. The LaCie drive would be all cash out of pocket.

All the product descriptions for the WD stuff, none of it says that it included backup software....all the LaCie descriptions say it comes with 1-Click Software bundled. Do you know if the WD drives come with software or is that an additional download or purchase?

Thanks for you help MaxxuM!

[tim]

Well, these most likely won't be going too far from my home workstation. I just want these to back up any important image files off my hard drive.

Get them offsite, you have to assume your house will be robbed then burned to the ground when you consider backups. Keep them at a friend or family members house, or at work.

[Medic1]

I was just thinking about it being a backup in case of file corruption or a crash of my primary computer. You make a good point though.

[S.E.V.]

I recently purchased a Lacie Big 2 Quadra running it in safe mode. 2tb run in safe mode down to 1tb but have hot swap capabilities. I also have a WD mybook but don't store any photos on it. I absolutely love the Lacie.

[Jim G]

I've been using both Lacie and WD externals for years and haven't had issues with either. Both seem pretty good brands to me.

[tim]

All hard drives fail, it's inevitable. The only question is when - day, weeks, months, or years. It might or might not happen overnight, but it will happen. Every hard drive fails eventually.

[mcluckie]

The WDs are famously bad. (externals, that is) Ask any computer salesguy -- especially at Apple. The My- Series is really bad with an enormous failure rate. I've 4 or 5 250Gb FW LaCie's with no problems. I beat em up and drag them everywhere. I also back up to other drives periodically.

[smcclelland]

I've got 2 x 500GB WD Mybook's hanging off of my Time Machine that act as shared storage for our household computers and a 1TB Mybook Studio Edition (FW800, eSATA) that I keep my Aperture library and photos on which is then mirrored over to a 4x1TB RAID10 enclosure using SilverKeeper. When traveling I've got a bus powered FW800 500gb WD Passport drive that I put all my photos on. None of the WD drives have had any ill-fate or problems thus far... actually all of my drives are WD now that I think about it :)

I also offload any good photos to flickr and keep original files stored on my web host offsite (after two years of tim beating it into my skull in every thread to go offsite)