I’m looking to buy a small external HDD for my music collection to play through Traktor, I’m not looking for anything too fancy. I was on amazon and saw some no name HDD’S that were really cheap. Only thing is that they have no customer reviews what so ever. Do you guys think it would be a safe bet to buy one of these drives or pay the extra 20 dollars for a Segate drive with more capacity? (I don’t really need all that extra capacity though)
There are only a very small handful of manufacturers of harddrives globally. The housing itself has no bearing on the reliability (provided you don’t drop it), and the drive inside will be from one of the big companies anyway.
Not so true. I bought a cheapo ext hard drive not too long ago. The loading time for files and folders was terribly slow aaaand the drive then became currupt somehow and no longer workend with my computer. I tried many solutions but just broke down and bought a new, better one.
The casings also have the SATA/ATA to USB/Firewire interface built in, so they do affect reliability and transfer speeds.
The biggest thing you want to look for–as far as what the manufacturer might give you–are MTTF (mean time to failure) numbers. If they don’t publish those or they’re not at least comparable to any numbers you might be able to get out of reputable manufacturers, I’d stay away.
I’ve had capacitors in cheap enclosures literally explode…thankfully, without damaging the hard drive. Still not sure what caused that, but it wasn’t an enclosure I took especially good care of.
IMHO, hard drives have gotten cheap enough, there’s no reason to skimp on them. Other World Computing aka MacSales.com (don’t be afraid of the name…an external is an external as far as compatibility goes) has decent prices on very good drives and enclosures that come very highly recommended in the photography world where professionals can generate a GB or more per day of intermediate products.
I just bought two 1TB (32MB Cache/7200RMP with USB, Firewire 400/800, and eSATA) from OWC I am very pleased with these drives. If you are looking for a drive to be working off of or playing off of you will want a good drive. If it is just for backup you can get away with a cheaper drive. The good drives are coming down in price though.
I have two OWC Mercury Elite Pro Classics. For cheaper bus-powered drives you might want to look at their OWC Express. Hope that helps a bit. Good luck finding a right drive for yourself.