# Recommendations for external FW hard drive

## audiodef

I need to go and get a new FireWire hard drive for use with a Gentoo box that I use for audio production (so this means fast RPMs, etc.). Can anyone recommend a brand/model?

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## forkbomb

Budget?

Storage size?

Do you require fault tolerance?

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## audiodef

Budget isn't a consideration. How I wish I could say that for everything!   :Razz: 

Storage size, 160 GB+ would be good. Terrabyte drives even better if it's fast and reliable. 

Fault tolerance would be good.

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## forkbomb

 *audiodef wrote:*   

> Budget isn't a consideration. How I wish I could say that for everything!  
> 
> Storage size, 160 GB+ would be good. Terrabyte drives even better if it's fast and reliable. 
> 
> Fault tolerance would be good.

 

If budget isn't a consideration, I'd actually personally look into one of those snazzy NAS units and skip the 1394. There's "budget isn't a consideration" and then there's "budget really isn't a consideration".  :Smile: 

Beyond that, for externals, it often gets religious and turns into an anectdote-vs-anectdote deal. Some folks swear by Fantom and swear at Cavalry. Some folks are the other way around.

Regarding the fault tolerance:

If that seems overkill, I'd personally go with a multibay enclosure and buy my own hard drives to put in it. A lot of these have RAID built in (often JBOD, RAID1, RAID0 - of these only RAID1 is fault tolerant as I'm sure you know). Bang for your buck, this may be the best approach, especially if you don't trust a "canned" solution to have decent performance or good drives. If you want fault tolerance and go with a two-bay unit, make sure it supports RAID1 (mirrored).

RAID might seem overkill, but if it's for a business or important personal docs, we all know not to trust data to a single disk.

Oddly, of the ones listed on Newegg that have Firewire support, a lot of them have pretty nasty customer reviews (FWIW - Newegg's customer reviews aren't exactly coming from experts in most cases).

I know, that doesn't narrow it down. Just musing, I guess.

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## audiodef

Thanks, fork! I really appreciate the time you took to advise. 

I guess after reading what you wrote, I realise fault tolerance isn't that big a deal, as I plan to make regular backups. 

I just want to make sure that whatever I buy will 1. work with my Gentoo box 2. have a good rep and 3. be at least 7200 rpm as it will be used for audio. I'm assuming that 4. has a fast interface would mean FW (faster than USB, right?).

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## forkbomb

Okay, no fault tolerance simplifies things.

As for speed:

USB2.0 ("Hi-Speed"): 480 Megabit/s 

IEEE1394 (aka Firewire): the original standard was supposed to get 400 Mbit/s, but newer IEE1394 standards (IEE1394b) can achieve 800Mbit/s.

(I don't use Firewire much, but the actual throughput may depend on what revision of the 1394 standard is on your motherboard. Externals being made currently should be compliant with the newer standards, but your board may not be. The way I understand it, newer Firewire devices are back-compatible so it'll work, just at the older speeds - same as with plugging a USB2.0 device into a motherboard that only supports 1.1.)

The holy grail of external interfaces is eSATA, if you by chance have a motherboard with an eSATA port.

As for Gentoo compatibility:

"Firewire" is actually a quasi trade name referring to the IEEE 1394 standard (an open standard), so implementations exist for it across OSs. 1394 should be pretty much plug and play with Gentoo as long as your kernel has the 1394 stack compiled in.

Some externals come with multiple external interfaces - often eSATA + USB2.0 or 1394 + USB2.0 (simply because USB2.0 support is almost everywhere).

As for rep and reliability:

The companies that make these externals seem to be notorious for putting crappy drives in their externals. Oddly, external 1TB drives are often cheaper than 1TB internals. But even still I'd personally go with a good enclosure and put my own drive in it.

Something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198004

Internal interface is SATA. Paired with a regular 3.5" SATA hard drive of your choice. 1TB seems to be "best bang for the buck" right now.

Not the cheapest way, but if you don't trust the canned solutions to have good drives...

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## audiodef

Hm. Again, my thanks.   :Cool: 

Would you recommend an internal, then? I'm sure I can fit it into my factory-built Dell. I was thinking of convenience of being able to move the drive around if necessary, but I think reliability is a pretty high priority. What would you recommend for internals?

I know I'm asking a lot of questions. I want to be able to get a good drive and be able to work with it and not have to "try" a bunch of stuff and deal with returns and stuff.

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## forkbomb

 *audiodef wrote:*   

> I know I'm asking a lot of questions. I want to be able to get a good drive and be able to work with it and not have to "try" a bunch of stuff and deal with returns and stuff.

 

If you want portability, then go with some sort of external solution. That means one of two things:

1) a "full" ready-to-use external drive of some sort

2) an external enclosure into which you throw (well, not literally) a compatible internal drive. The internal interface these days will usually be SATA or SATA II.

I don't trust (1) particularly. I've seen my fair share of people complaining about the drives in the (1) they bought failing. Hard drives fail, yes, but the number seems high. The fact that (1) is a cheaper (and sometimes substantially) solution than (2) may or may not be related. Of course, all the failures of the "ready to go" (as opposed to buying an encolsure and putting your own disk in) external drives I've seen are anectdotal. Two cents, grain of salt, etc.

As for internal drives if you want to go the external enclosure route - if you've never bought an internal before, big brands these days are Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate. Each company has a reasonable track record.  (As for me, I don't have much personal loyalty in terms of hard drives. I've had about as much luck with Seagate as with Western Digital in terms of quality and failure rates. Hitachi is solid, too.)

As for me, I'd consider these three a toss-up for 500GB (1TB might be worth your dollar):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145215

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148395

Then again, I'm no hard drive enthusiast.

Stay away from "green" drives - they'll probably rotate at 5400RPM (or variable speeds) and you specifically mentioned 7200.

And as far as the "ready to go solution", I've been watching these for rebates:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204089

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101082

(However, no Firewire on those - my machines have motherboards with eSATA ports.)

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## audiodef

Thanks, dude. This is mucho appreciated.   :Smile:   :Smile:   :Smile: 

I've never had problems with WD drives, and given that the reviews mention this one as both fast and quiet, I think I'll go with one of those, 500 GB (passing up a TB drive so as to not have to deal with longer seek times).

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## forkbomb

Not a problem. Just make sure if you go with an enclosure that said inclosure supports SATA for its internal interface.

There are probably better drives out there (SATA II, bigger cache) but for 500GB that's not bad (considering I paid a lot more than that for a 320GB a few years ago!  :Smile:  ).

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