I bought a new disk drive to use with my shiny new iMac, specifically for use with Time Machine. Picking out the right drive to buy was itself educational.
There’s a tendency in geek circles to succumb to what I call measurebation, which more or less means to compare products solely by their feature lists. You pick the product at your price point that has bigger numbers on it, and you’re done. The problem is that this approach often ignores the tangibles.
Yes, tangibles. Some commentators like to refer to attributes such as industrial design or build quality as “intangibles.” That is because they are stupid. Build quality is no less tangible than, say, CPU speed. It’s just harder to put on a box.
When selecting my backup drive, I had two specific tangible qualities, apart from price, in mind:
(1) It had to store “enough” data. How much data is “enough” was negotiable.
(2) It had to be perfectly quiet. This was not negotiable.
The sweet spot in external hard-disk based storage right now, if you’re only looking at price and capacity, is a terabyte. Nearly every manufacturer makes a terabyte unit at what can only be described as an astonishingly low price. You can walk into your local Best Buy and walk out with more storage than we ever dreamed of in 1990.
The problem with these terabyte units is that most of them are really little RAID arrays of 2 500 Gb disks. 2 disks in one assembly means they put out more heat. That means they require more active cooling systems, such as fans. That means they are all, as near as I can tell, too loud for my purposes.
I eventually settled on a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750Gb drive
If I wasn’t worried about getting saliva on my data, I would kiss it.
Amusingly, now that my monster video editing station is set up and configured, my camcorder has finally died the death. So it will be a little while before I can pick up a replacement and start making booze videos again. Sic transit gloria Canon.
This is actually REALLY helpful. Having just installed Leopard, I was about to go on a big hunt for a visually appealing, really quiet external drive. You have just saved me many seconds, possibly minutes of googling.
Now I need to see if they have a 500gb version…
I got 500GB drives from “Other World Computing”… which I like a lot. They are quiet but not silent, and aluminium.
They do have a 500 Gb version. It is rumoured to be just as quiet. I found the amazon reviews to be very helpful in this regard.
I know this may bring me howls of derision from the turnkey product crowd, but I am very happy with my quiet, small footprint “ICY DOCK” enclosure.
It currently houses a 320 GB Hitachi drive. The crazies on the internet also point to Samsung drives as being good in fanless cases.
Now that capacity is so immense, I’d like to see them concentrate on reliability. Replication and replaceable drives, all in one self-contained unit.
Stewart,
As far as that goes, bbum swears by the Drobo data robot.
But it’s not silent. So I’ll wait.
-peter
There are plenty of firewire RAID boxes with hot swappable drives. But they are expensive because the market is smaller.
I’m stunned that storage is down to $.34 per gigabyte when it’s packaged conveniently and aesthetically.
I had some really bad experiences with 1TB My Book Home edition drives, I returned them and got the exact same drive you did. The only bummer was the lack of firewire. The only bad thing about these drives is that they put the fan on the bottom of the unit, so if you have them running for a long time, the desk under the drive is very hot. Or if you stack your external drives on top of your tower mac, you are just heating your mac.