Mac 101: External HDs

Hi, I was looking for some help. I just had a 1TB hard drive stop working and I don't know if the enclosure is the problem or the hard drive. I was going to transfer the HD into another case, but when I opened it up, it is actually 2x3.5" 500GB SATA HD's raided together. So now, in order to attempt to get anything off of it, I need to transfer both together into a new case. Would the NSA2-S350U from Macally take care of this problem or is it more complicated than that?

Somebody needs to say a good word for Glyph drives. Best enclosure (whisper quiet fan cools the drive), best warranty (free data reco the first two years) ... and best of all, no wall wart/AC adapter. Digidesign approved for Pro Tools. All interfaces. Cost more, and worth it.

You have to reset the PRAM by holding apple+option+p+r a startup. I have installed the os on my firewire a few times also. Hope that helps.

I have a FreeAgent Pro external drive, using firewire 400 connected with my iMac. no any problem, however it takes too long time to backup or copy entire drive (750GB). As iMac does not has eSATA, i wonder any vendor provide firewire 800 external drive, that would save time on backup or copy.

I have two external hard drives. One is a LaCie external hard drive with USB2.0 as the connection and it acts as my Time Machine backup. My second external hard drive is Western Digital and is inside a Antec MX-1 which has both USB2.0 and eSATA. I have a Griffin eSATA ExpressCard adapter.

I had a Lacie 500gb BigDisk die on me awhile back. Turned out there were 2 250gb Maxtors in there.

I now have a 250gb Ethernet drive (which I do not reccommend... especially with AirDisk and whatnot), and a 500gb (Porsche I believe). I'm scarred, especially with the Ethernet drive.

I don't trust Lacie anymore, and from now on will stop putting off getting an enclosure. Any suggestions (a firewire one. 800'd be nice)?

I saw someone diss the WD Caviar, how do others feel about it? I just got one a week ago thinking that I could trust the WD brand... did I think wrong?

Thanks for your help!

Another video production guy here. We've had an odd problem recently with a couple of our Western Digital MyBook drives.

Our two Final Cut edit systems are running Tiger, and we recently upgraded all of our other Macs to Leopard. We've found that after we plug a drive into a Leopard system and work with it, the Tiger computers can no longer mount the drives. The device shows up in disk utility, but the Mount option is grayed out and the volume doesn't appear. They are formatted MacOS Extended. It's happened with both a MyBook Premium (USB/FW400) and a MyBook World (USB/FW400/FW800).

Any ideas what might be causing this? Is Leopard updating the partition table or something?

Also, another vote for problematic Lacie's. The d2's have been OK, but anything with dual internal disks are junk.

When I had my G5 PPC I made the mistake of buying a Lacie 1TB BigDisk with the Triple Interface. This included FW800 / FW400 / USB 2.0.

I found this drive to be slow when it was not in use and then you went to save something to it. This was due to it going to sleep. I also felt it had to do with something else. I decided I was going to just take the drives out of the unit and put them in my drive bays so they were internal.

I opened the unit and looked at the drives, to my surprise they were IDE drives and not SATA. That made me angry I guess I should have read the specs a bit closer but you would think for the price of the unit(s) you would think they would use SATA drives.

A month after I opened the unit (3 months after owning it) one of the drives died and I lost all data. This was due to the form of RAID the drive used. I cannot stress this enough. If you ware worried about data loss, do not buy one of these drives.

Although they did use Western Digital drives internally when one drive goes you're out of luck.

Two points:
I've been using the Buffalo Mini-station 320gb 2.5 ext drive for six months, a great fast drive for itunes/software storage, and doesn't require power to run.

One thing I can't believe OSX handles so bad compared to my Windows days, is that you have to unmount every drive when you walk away from the computer just in case it goes to sleep and you have a load of unmount errors. that's just crazy!

I work in the postproduction industry, and we see just about every type mentioned above, especially the LaCie d2 series and the GRaids and GDrives.

For those of you experiencing trouble with the LaCie drives that require a power supply, in particular the d2s, check your power supply. LaCie had a problem with the older, flatter power supplies for the d2 drives (sorry, I don't have the part number off hand). My facility has about two dozen of these, and we eventually had to replace every one of the original power supplies (in the past five years I've seen only two cases' electronics fail and only three OEM drives) with a newer stubbier type. Check the voltages on the pins if you experience random problems, especially FW drives that are slow to mount on the desktop or disappear without being disconnected. The power supply has a diagram that shows which pins carry what voltage. If it's more than a volt or so out of spec and you experience intermittent problems, replace it. Places like CDW and the LaCie websites sell a newer type of replacement power supply. It sucks that we had to replace so many, but the drives themselves were rarely to blame for their problems and worked fine once I replaced the power supplies. Although LaCie does not seem to have officially acknowledged the problem, they did seem to be aware of it and they did discontinue selling the older style power supply. I have not had a problem with the current ones that replaced them. Check the LaCie website for the type that your particular drive requires.

For those that cannot use the mini usb connector because it doesn't provide power, like the LaCie Rugged, check their website for a combo cable that plugs into one USB port on the computer for data and a second USB port that supplies only power to the power port on the Rugged drive.