Drive recommendations (large storage)

I've currently got a late model 2009 iMac (FireWire or USB - no thunderbolt) and have a fw800 western digital mybook II 6tb drive as my main working/storage drive, with backups going to various usb2 drives.

For the second time now, after a reboot, it reports a unreadable - with OSx telling me to format it to get access back... Annoying doesn't begin to cover it. Yes, I have backups, but I have close to 3tb of data and that takes foreve to move and copy around.

So, now I don't trust the damn drive. Anyone got recommendations for affordable, large data storage solutions? I'm thinking drobo, but s buddy with one is recommending against it due to its proprietary raid nature.

Thoughts?

http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6817993019

I got a couple of these and have one in each of two tower machines running Linux. A mix of Western Digital and Seagate 2TB SATA drives populate them. I also have 4 more drives no in them, and rotate around from time to time to make more backups. Been about a year now and no issues.

EVERY one of my many external drives have died, some as soon as less than a year of age. I suspect the power supply, and that if I crack them open and use the drive direct under a real power supply, and reformat them to get good signals written again, they would be OK. BTW, a couple of the externals "died" by just not running faster than about 1MB/sec.

I gave up on these externals.

Won't work for me - needs a sata connection, and I'm running an iMac. Thanks though!

I'd suggest you look into hard drives with better reliability characteristics.

OEM/Consumer PC drives are built to specific engineering design points. These are basically a 700K to 1M hour MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) with a 8/5 20% duty cycle. This means that the drive is expected to last 700,000 hours before it fails, working eight hours a day, five days a week, with their HDA active 20% of the time. Most commercial drives, on the other hand, are designed to have an MTTF of 1.4M hours, with a 24/7 100% duty cycle. That is, they have a design MTTF twice as long, but during those hours their HDAs are expected to be active 100% of the time. (Think of an airline reservation system database, for example).

The difference in the manufacturing characteristics that derive from the design decisions is that the consumer drive costs about 100 bucks per terabyte, and the manufacturers hope they will last at least five years. Commercial drives cost much more - from say, a dollar per gigabyte (up to 100GB) to fifty cents per gigabyte at a 500 GB size. I just bought a 600GB 10000K rpm drive for $259, and my system drives are 74GB Velociraptors. This is mostly why there really aren't any large (multi-terrabyte) commercial drives. Small drives are less expensive, and much less work (because of lower capacity) to replace.

I've picked up a G-Drive (3tb model) as the replacement. This MyBook II is the new, 6tb version - and way *way* under the numbers you list - and I have several other WD USB drives of older ages still running fine.

I don't see this failure as a specific drive problem - it's more likely an OSX issue - the drive mounts, but is read only by OSX and due to being RAID 1, it can't be "recovered" by the built in tools.

I bought a Buffalo NAS drive. It's a pretty cool option because you can set it up as a server and you can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. I like being able to clear space on my laptop on the fly, or dig up old photos at any time, so I'm a big fan.

Sam6644 wrote in post #14399292
I bought a Buffalo NAS drive. It's a pretty cool option because you can set it up as a server and you can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. I like being able to clear space on my laptop on the fly, or dig up old photos at any time, so I'm a big fan.

I've been doing something similar with a usb drive on a time capsule - looking for higher speed local drives at this point - but the NAS system is prety neat!