eSata 1+ TB External HD

I have filled up another external hard drive and now I am in the market for a new one. It seems to me that the best price per gb is upwards from 1 TB.

I have a LaCie which has served me very well and a friend of mine who is a graphic designer has several and has never had a problem with them.

I am open to all brands, but I would like to consider some factors:

1. Noise. The drive should be relatively quiet, enough so that I can be downloading to it on a constant basis at the bedside without keeping me up at night (the LaCie does fine here).

2. Heat. The drive should not have problems with overheating, obviously.. If it does get "hot" but does not affect its performance that isn't a problem.

3. Performance. I want something that utilizes as much of the eSata 300 port as possible, while still having the flexibility to work on a USB 2.0 port when it will be used on computers without eSata.

4. Reliability. I would prefer a drive with good reliability, and not just a good warranty. In my experience even LaCie with its relatively short 2/3 year warranty does fine and the warranty is not a telltale of its reliability.

5. Capacity. I would prefer 1 TB or more.

6. Size. Forgot to mention this at first. One thing I like about my LaCie is that it's small enough to throw in the backpack without taking up a huge chunk of space..

Thanks in advance to anyone who wants to give their subjective or objective opinions to help me make a purchasing decision. BTW The Japanese market is readily available to me as well in case that helps, though I prefer buying in the USA because it's usually cheaper. But I do live in Japan.

 

If you have a rarely used lacie hdd, buy a 1TB hdd for about $80-100USD and replace it in your Lacie case.

If you don't have a spare external hdd, then external hdd with esata, firewire, usb, gbe lan, would be the best. E.g. wd world edition 2TB.

 

So you recommend the WD World Edition 2 TB?

I don't really want to use an existing Lacie case if I were to do that I might as well just purchase an external hard drive kit.. any pros/cons of doing this?

 

The WD MyBook series are quiet and cool. You can often find them on sale with great discounts.

I have 8 of them, ranging from 500GB to 1TB.

 

Best price for a HDD is ~1TB though I have seen some good 1.5TB deals.

Nothing wrong with a fully pre-built unit, but you may get away cheaper and have a more customized unit by getting the HDD and enclosure separate.

You can get a 1TB HDD for $99 easy, then find the enclosure that has the connections you want and a look you like.

The only thing is you often find great sales for fully pre-built units like built said. I got a 500gb 2.5" external for like $54 just a few weeks ago, you cant even build one that cheap (though it was via stacking various discounts/coupons)

I'll go over to newegg and see if I cant pick out a good combo for you that has esata & usb with a 1tb drive.

 

Ok here is the results of my hunt.

For 1TB use code Seag72 and get this drive for $79 shipped.

If you want more capacity in a single drive and dont mind spending a bit more here is 1.5TB for $129 shipped.

Now for the enclosure..

$30 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392030

$30 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817348020

$19 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817347018

I actually like the $19 one. So you can get away as cheap as $79 + $19 for a $98 total shipped as all things here have free shipping to get 1TB external drive with usb 2.0 & e-sata.

 

Since you didn't mention cost, maybe try 2x 2.5" Hitachi 5K500.B 500GB drives in RAID0 enclosure. It will be a lot quieter than any desktop hard drive and smaller too, but at a cost.

 

Not really... NCIX had a sale couple weeks ago. It had Seagate 500GB HDD with a separate enclosure for $55 CAD or about $50 USD. Such low prices is highly determined by luck and discounts like you've said.

WD my Book world edition is a Nas that can be connected to your network (GbE would be better suited)

If you want Esata, get WD my book home edition.

 

Vicious - Nice. I prefer the 19 dollar one as well.

sgogeta - I am having a hard time finding a 2x2.5" enclosure. The one I found on newegg was $120 by itself and looks a bit bulky..

The my book world does look a little large, like a NAS.

My book home edition looks like a good deal.. now I wonder what the advantage of getting this would be over going the make my own route.

Is there any reason to worry about the DIY external kits being any less plug and play than the ready made drives?

I have a LaCie hand me down which is full as well as a "Yukai Media Center" which I use only as an external hd.. and not as a media center like it is intended.

Here's hoping the new ZuneHD will be available in large sizes, like 100gb+.. my zune30 is full as well.

 

DIY is usually better if for no other reason than warranty. That $79 Seagate has a 3 year warranty. Most pre-builts only have a 1 year warranty.

 

I think you've convinced me to go the DIY route..

I can pick up a drive with a 3-5 year warranty for a similarly decent price out here in Japan and I have an endless selection of external enclosures, Scythe and Silverstone being two manufacturers which there are hoards of stuff out here from..

Thanks for helping out.. now I know what to get myself for my 25th bday

Does anyone know if the WD Caviar Green OEM (SPCR preferred quiet model) comes with the 1/2/3/5 year warranty? It isn't saying on newegg's site..

 

Maybe check out the WD site, I dont remmeber myself on that drive.

the "green" drives are 5400rpm not 7200rpm they save power, run cooler, and are quieter but dont run as fast.

Good for a storage drive, which is what your using it for, but not so good for your primary hard disk.

 

Since he's using Esata for the external HDD, the WD green drives will be a poor choice. When 7200RPm drives are idle, the noise inaudiable.

 

I respectfully disagree. As an external drive, latency isn't a big deal as if it were a main drive. The higher density, slower RPM drive will still give it enough speed for sustained and random R/W, not to mention it will be a lot cooler due to their lower power consumption. External enclosures tend to be poorly ventilated and can get quite hot.

 

What are you comparing highier desity drive to? 7200RPM drives have the same areal density per platter as WD green. With the eSATA enclosure that he's planning to use (stated in the title), 7200rpm drives have faster throughput and lower access time than WD green..

The OP doesn't care if it runs cooler as long as it's reliable and it works. The noise are about the same for both 7200RPM drives and WD green. They're both very quiet and inaudiable from a distance.

 

I suggest actually reading his post:

1. noise, 2. heat, 3. performance, 4. reliability, 5. capacity, 6. size.

Noise and heat are primary concerns. To those that are sensitive to noise, there is a difference btw WD Green and any 7200RPM drive out there - it is definitely ahead of other drives in these two respects.

And also, density is higher for WD Green. There are no other 2TB drives, nor even reliable 1.5TB (Seagate has a host of problems and I do not know if they have resolved them).

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article927-page6.html

Page 4 shows more details on much quieter it is to other drives. The tests done are very accurate (professional equipment) and are reproducible.

 

I've read what the OP said.
1) He stated that his Lacie external HDD is already quiet enough. Assuming that's 7200RPM drive, newer generation 7200RPM drive should be more quiet. Thus noise isn't a problem for him. My 1TB hitachi 7200RPM hdd is more quiet than my 5400RPM 2.5" hdd in my old laptop.

2) Heat - since most hdd enclosures are designed for 7200RPM drives, heat is generally not an issue. Besides. hdd can be run at 60*Celsius without a problem. 60*C will give you a "burning" sensation. A little bit more heat compared to WD GP doesn't cause a lot of issues. Standard 1TB 7200RPM drives uses about 8W when idle. GreenGP hdd are about 20% lower in power consumption.

3) Performance, 7200RPM drives almost always outperforms 5400RPM drives.

4) Areal density. All WD GP with the exception of the newest 2TB WD GP use the same disk plattter as the regular 7200RPM counterpart. 500GB platters will soon reach the 7200RPM sections. Seagate also solved the reliability problem on the 1.5TB hdd via firmware upgrades. Newer revision of the drive doesn't suffer from the problems.

5) Size - 2TB drives are very expensive. You can buy 3-4 1TB drives with the the money spent on a single 2TB drive. But if the OP wants absolutely the maximum capacity, 2TB WD GP is his only choice right now.

BTW.. the differences in the noise output from that review site is not a lot.
WD GP: 13dba idle 14dba seek
WD Cavier Black: 21dba idle 25dba seek.
Other quiet 1TB drives are around 18dba idle and and 20dba seek.
A quiet office is around 30-40dBa. A pin drop is 10dBa. A very quiet home is about 25dBa.
So... the difference in an average home between the hdds are: inaudiable vs even more inaudiable.

The main reason why 7200RPM hdd are better because of its cheap price.

 

Really it goes without saying the 7200rpm drive is faster, but like I said above this is a storage drive, not a primary drive.

the "green" series is more fitting for an external enclosure since it is cooler & quieter.

the speed difference will probably only come into account on one occasion, the first time he is moving all of his files onto the drive if he has a ton of files to transfer. Other than that the 5400rpm drive will be more than up to the task to stream media or data in real time and work as a storage medium.

Id stay away from 2TB drives due to cost 1TB or 1.5TB is a good way to go. The 1TB seagate has no issues, the 1.5TB seagate had some issues that was resovled with the new firmware. I would think you would get the new firmware if your ordered it now, but if not you can do it yourself.

 

The OP didn't seem concerned about cost (not in any of the top 6 factors, even physical size was 6th), hence why I mentioned dual 2.5" 500GB drives or a single 3.5" 2TB drive. If one was cost conscious, these wouldn't be an option.

 

The OP said this, "though I prefer buying in the USA because it's usually cheaper. But I do live in Japan."

 

That doesn't mean that cost is not a problem. Of course if I can get the best solution there for cheaper, I'd take that. He is just stating a preference. If cost were a concern, he/she should post a budget and put that in his 6 factors.

 

So much activity while I sleep!!

Well thanks everyone for so much input.

I didn't mean to start a battle although I think it's healthy.

Cost is probably something I should have included. I thought common sense would indicate that lower price is always better. Perhaps what I should have done is state that "I'm not wealthy and I don't plan on spending a ton of money on this, so let's keep the whole thing as close to $100-$150 as possible.

To quell some arguements:

Noise IS a concern. While I don't mind the LaCie downloading all night, because it's reasonably quiet, I would always prefer not to add to the noise. If you take two things that are "somewhat quiet" and put them together, their cumulative noise will be more audible across the spectrum than either of them alone, so I would prefer to have a drive as close to quiet as possible.

As far as heat and performance I am not overly concerned with heat, but I would rather do as much as possible to prevent future problems with heat arising from choosing too hot of a drive. I have had good luck with SPCR recommended components in years past, so I will likely continue that tradition with the WD Green. The performance hit will be negligible, and probably not even noticeable, as stated in the OP the drive will be used for downloading.

Though I forgot to add size until a little later, it is a concern and I did explain that smaller is better because the drive will sometimes be thrown into my backpack and taken back to the states, or elsewhere.

Raid 0 2.5" drives is a great idea, but overkill for my purposes. First of all I have had raid arrays fail on me and I need not worry about the increased probability of failure in a raid array simply because I want a little bit faster speeds. Also in my searching an enclosure that would accommodate two drives is expensive and bulky, even when compared to a 3.5". Of course I will not completely rule out 2.5", and when I go to search around today, I'll see if there are any cases that are more suitable than the one I found on newegg for $120.

I'll update everyone later when I get home.

Thanks to all for the input. Keep hashing it out if you wish, and thank you all for remaining civil to one another.

 

The 2TB WD GP will cost you well over $250USD for the drive alone so it'll not be suitable for you. You can buy a 1TB WD Green for $90USD from newegg. You can save $5 if you get a hitachi 7200RPM 1TB, a very quiet (a bit more noise than WD green, around 15-18dBa) and runs about as cool as WD green. The choice is yours whether you want to buy WD green or get the hitachi one. The hitachi is cheaper, faster. The WD green is a little bit more power efficent, lower transfer speed, slightly lower noise output.

As for the drive enclosure, you can buy it in Japan. It should be cheaper there.

 

Yeah I'm getting ready to head out.

I'm sure the drive enclosures as well as hard drives will be somewhat in line with the newegg prices.

I won't be in the USA any time soon so I'll just buy everything on the JDM. The money I save from converting yen to dollar, etc will negate any savings I have from waiting until i return stateside to purchase from newegg.

Hopefully I can still find a 1tb under ichimayen (~$100).

Yeah as far as enclosures it's ridiculous, even smaller computer shops here in Japan are flooded with high quality scythe, silverstone, etc stuff.

Again I'll update when I get home.

 

Back. Got the hard drive WD Green 1TB for about $75 and the case was more.. almost $40. Total $115.00

 

Hmm. I formatted the hard drive in two partitions, one partition ext3 about 950gb and another fat32 13 gb and i put the ext2 drivers from fs-driver.org on it. Then I tried to view the drive in Vista32 and it asked if I wanted to format.. Bah.

 

Do you use linux a lot? If not, just format everything to NTFS and get a NTFS driver for linux. NTFS is compatible with more computers than ext3.

 

Linux > Windows > OSX

 

I just read your post again. I can't believe i missed the detail... You might want to install the ext3 driver on Vista since you're trying to access a EXT3 partition. Your earlier post said you installed EXT2 driver.

 

I wasn't aware that there was an ext3 driver. The ext2 driver is said to work for ext2 and 3 but minus journaling for 3. If there's an ext3 driver for vista I'd love to know where.

 

Problem solved.

For future reference:

I used a Western Digital Green 1TB hard drive along with a Century external hard drive enclosure.

I used Gparted on Ubuntu 9.04 to create two partitions: One Fat32 for Windows/OSX 13gb, and one ext3 for Linux 904gb.

I had trouble at first mounting the partitions because permissions are by default set to 7-5-5 for users. I changed this using chmod 777 partitionnamehere

Then I put the driver from fs-driver.org along with a similar ext2/3 driver for OSX that I found using google (mine is called Ext2FS_1.4d4.dmg).

I then took the external hard drive over to a Vista laptop. The Fat32 partition of course mounted fine and I installed the fs-driver.org driver. It asked me a series of questions, and I did enable large file support and UTF-8. I then assigned the drive a letter and set it to assign automatically in the future.

Upon attempting to mount this drive, it asked me if I wanted to format.

I then referred to fs-driver.org's FAQ section which pointed me to mountdiag.exe

So I put mountdiag.exe on the Vista machine and ran mountdiag.exe j: (the name of the ext3 partition).

It told me that the Inode size of 256 bytes is not compatible with the driver, and that I must use an Inode size of 128 bytes.

With two options at hand, I chose the simpler path, using the less stable ext2fsd-0.46a.exe

While most people report this driver to be less stable, it does support Inode sizes of 256 bytes.

I will report back to this thread if I have any stability issues of my own.