I am not given to declarations of consumer affiliation (subliminal: buy !) But last year I waxed rhapsodic about Seagate’s FreeAgent Pro external drives, and tonight, well, I’m going to do it again. I needed more storage, and I couldn’t quite convince myself to shell out the cash for a Drobo storage robot (mostly because I was afraid it would be loud) so instead I just bought another FreeAgent. Specifically, I picked up the 1 Terabyte model
Every good thing I said about the 750 Gb model holds true for the 1 Tb. It is perfectly quiet. I can’t hear it unless I put my ear up to it. In some ways, it’s even better. They toned down the manically happy packaging to a purely functional level. The firewire interface, which used to come in a sort of offboard daughtercard that needed to be swapped out with a screwdriver, is now built in: the unit comes out of the box able to do USB or Firewire 400 with either full-size or mini-connectors. It also comes with both Firewire and USB cables, so no panicked trips to Fry’s or Best Buy for the cable you forgot are necessary.
They’re little, they’re quiet, they work great, and I sort of dig the orange light (which you can turn off with a Seagate-provided utility if it bugs you). I’ve heard through the grape vine that this model is soon to be discontinued, so buy five copies of these, per the consumer rule, before they mess it up.
(OK, actually, buying 5 of any disk drive, given the rate at which storage technology advances, is probably not a winning strategy. But I’ve noticed that even with all my 21st century space-age-au-go-go applications, like HD video editing, 1 terabyte feels a lot “bigger” to me, in terms of my storage needs, than 1 gigabyte felt when the first gigabyte drives were released.)
Did you consider the Time Capsule from your buddy ? Or don’t you want the network accessibility?
I did consider it! I skipped it for two reasons.
First, my backup strategy involves rotating drives about once every year or two and storing the old drive off-site.
Second, I had just bought an Airport Extreme right before the Time Capsule was announced. So psychologically there’s a bit of a hurdle to go buy something that looks the same and performs half of the same function — even though that’s not quite rational.
I bought several LaCie 500 GB external hard drives “designed by F.A. Porsche”… For starters, I like that they match, but I also like that they all have the same power adapter… I can keep one in my laptop bag, two next to my main desktop computer, and one by my media center PC. I am really irritated that I want more disk space and can’t find the same drive anywhere. I like the fact that my power supplies are interchangeable. And I still prefer the similar look-and-style.
I buy drives from Other World Computing. They all use basically the same hardware. I just buy bigger ones every year or two.
I just wish I had enough stuff to justify the purchase. Any thoughts on getting a six year old Dell laptop to crap out so I can get a new ‘puter? Actually the motherboard is only four years old.
I’d buy a Drobo tomorrow if it included GigE and eSata. Why on earth they put out a V2 of this product w/o those options is beyond me. It’s $475 for an empty unit and another $199 for the DroboShare. Insane.
With three kids & a wife all wanting/needing access to the same pool of music & photos, a NAS box was the only option for me. I started looking at FreeNAS & Linux options but wasn’t happy with having to have a power hunger PC running all the time. FC4 & SecureLinux also wasted several days of my life. In the end I settled on a Thecus N2100. It’s certainly not the faster thing on earth but it fits the bill for our needs.