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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Which External Drives are More Stable- Power Supply or Not?
Paul Alesse, Photographer
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Centereach | NY | USA | Posted: 8:40 AM on 07.13.10 |
->> With the ever increasing storage capabilities of drives without external power supplies, such as the WD Passport, I'm considering using these more often. The storage capacity now rivals the My Book, it takes up less physical space on the desk, is powered by its own USB only, and most importantly... I can now get a 1 TB Passport for around $150 or less.
So, my only remaining question is how stable are these drives compared to the larger, plug in drives? Physical size, storage capacity, and price would all be moot if the drives fail in a year. I know that heat is a factor, but the one I have plugged in permanently is barely luke warm to the touch. My track record in the past has been mixed. I had a couple of them fail after 1 or 2 plug-ins essentially at the same time, so I'm thinking I passed them over a magnetic field or something, and I currently have 2 that have lasted for over 3 years without a problem. Seems like if you get past the initial hump, they are durable. But I still need to know the facts from a geek standpoint.
Any help would be appreciated. |
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Alan Look, Photographer
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Bloomington/Normal | IL | United States | Posted: 10:02 AM on 07.13.10 |
->> If it's electrical or mechanical, it can fail.
I have 3 1/2 TB drives all identical with external power supplies. I purchased them all alike on purpose because of the external power supply. None have failed, all are 2 years old or more. They contain my RAW's, computer backup, and processed jpg's.
I also have a 1/2 TB WD Passport (with the dock) that I keep the compressed copyrighted versions on. I bought it because I liked the physical size and because I didn't want to mess with another external power supply. The model of larger drives I have was obsolete so I couldn't get another one.
Trust them? only to a point. My selects are also stored on PhotoShelter. All my images are also on DVD. I trust the drives less than PhotoShelter and more than the DVD's. |
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Mike Burley, Photographer
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Dubuque | Iowa | USA | Posted: 10:36 AM on 07.13.10 |
| ->> (Knock on wood) Thus far, only 1 out of 10-12 drives I've owned has failed. It was the most expensive one, a Lacie (which actually had a Western Digital drive inside - I think the case allowed it to get way too hot. |
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Paul Calhoun, Photographer
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Hillsborough | NC | U.S. | Posted: 10:53 AM on 07.13.10 |
->> We have upwards of 80 TB stored in external drives with external power supplies. We have had a couple of failures with Lacie drives (that were barely a month out of warranty) but have never had an issue with Western Digital.
I would take a close look at the actual working speed of the drives powered by USB only before I invested. Even some of the external power supply drives don't run as fast as projected.
For maximum speed and durability in our working drives we have gone to external housings that each hold two eSata internal drives. We connect them to the computers with eSata cables. They are so much faster than most laptop drives and USB or Firewire connected drives it is amazing. You can use a "striped" set up to make them even faster, but the risk there is that if one drive crashes you lose the data on both drives in the housing. |
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Butch Miller, Photographer
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Lock Haven | PA | USA | Posted: 12:00 PM on 07.13.10 |
->> My only concern would be data throughput speed with bus powered drives for the overall read and write times could be a bottleneck in some workflow situations. I very much prefer a bus powered drive for location work ... but still prefer a powered external for heavy use back in the office.
I use two sets of four bay trayless hot swap SATA housings connected via FW800 ... though I would really like eSATA ... one tower is working files, the other is their backup clones ... swapping out bare SATA drives is a breeze and keeps the clutter to a minimum. |
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Debra L Rothenberg, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 6:32 PM on 07.13.10 |
| ->> I have 16 LaCie drives ranging from 250gb to 1tb and not a single issue with any of them. I know some people here don't like LaCie, but they have worked great for me so I have no complaints. |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 7:09 PM on 07.13.10 |
->> 3.5" (internal desktop or external with power supply) drives have historically tended to be more stable than 2.5" (laptop and small external) hard drives; the thing countering that now is that the 2.5" drives are getting more durable since so many people are using laptops. But if you're lugging a drive around in a gear bag, you're still always going to have a high failure rate - and the tendency is to do so more with those little drives :)
The heat gain that others have mentioned is primary a factor of speed; if you're using a 12,800 rpm drive instead of a 5400 rpm drive you're going to get a lot more heat. The exchange is that a 12,800 is going to be able to read data a lot faster.
Drives (and hardware in general) tend to fail most in just the first few days of use; mfg's now use more checks on new drives (which is why they're so much more reliable now), but you'll be best off if you dump a bunch of data on it overnight, delete it, and do it again, just to make sure that there's not a manufacturing defect in the drive.
Whatever way you go, you gotta have a couple copies - drive failure is not a function of manufacturer or capacity or size (and every company has something go wrong in the process every once in a while) - it's simply a matter of time. Also, rarely will a drive fail completely before it starts losing data in small segments. Any drive that's been in use for more than a few months will start to have data that reads incorrectly, or something in the directory structure that fails, or some other issue related to the drive being an imperfect medium. This happens because of impurities on the drive's surface which are impossible to get rid of because of thermodynamics and because of other things being present - magnetic fields from other drives and other parts of the same drive, and those small little shocks that might make a microscopic particle of dust break loose from where ever and settle itself on the surface of a platter.
A RAID enclosure is one of those things that will just make life better and easier over time (especially if you go ahead and get one with USB3/FW800/SATA). When drives get bigger (or a drive fails) you just pop out the old one and pop in the new one and it takes care of everything for you. |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 7:10 PM on 07.13.10 |
->> Debra-
LaCie is a case manufacturer; the drives they use change from day to day. |
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Paul Calhoun, Photographer
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Hillsborough | NC | U.S. | Posted: 3:33 PM on 07.28.10 |
| ->> Apparently my two Lacies must have had drives in them they bought on a bad day. Have you ever contacted their customer service? Not the most charming or helpful folks. |
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Neil Turner, Photographer
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Bournemouth | UK | United Kingdom | Posted: 10:03 AM on 07.29.10 |
->> I have a lot of LaCie drives and have had two fail on me in the last month or so. In the past my only issue with them has been poor quality power supply units, which have been replaced with newer ones.
The two units are both NINE years old which is something of a record and inside both have Western Digital 120Gb drives. One of them has been successfully recovered and the other has not. Neither was the sole resting place of any data. I am now using RAID 1 for everything and the LaCie drives are functioning beautifully with Seagate internals which I intend to replace with Hitachis in a few months. |
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Jerry Lai, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Chicago | IL | USA | Posted: 12:46 PM on 07.29.10 |
| ->> For what it's worth, I have two Western Digital Passports, both work flawlessly. I have one MyBook and it failed about 4 days ago. |
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