[Tig] removable storage disks

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, Jack James wrote:
> Hi there,
> I'm wondering what experiences people have had with removable storage
> disks, i.e. firewire and usb disks, especially high-capacity ones, in
> terms of their reliability when sending them across the world. I'm
> absolutely fed up of the appalling unreliability of lacie drives (my
> last estimates were that about 30% seem to fail within a year), and
> was going to go with G-Disks instead, but I'm hearing from a
> distributor that they've been having lots of returns of those lately.
> Any other options out there?

I purchased a 600GB LaCie "RAID 0" drive which did fail, but a bit 
past its warranty period.  I should have known better than to purchase 
any RAID 0 product since such products are at least 2X (but probably 
4X) more likely to fail than single drive units.  I took the broken 
unit apart and it seemed to be reasonably well constructed.  One of 
the hard drives failed to spin up so the failure could be blamed on 
the hard drive rather than LaCie's "value add".

There is an old adage "You get what you pay for" and I think it 
applies here.  The market is very price competitive so vendors like 
LaCie purchase the absolute cheapest drives with the desired capacity. 
There are only three large drive vendors in the world (Seagate, 
Western Digital, and Fujitsu) so you can be sure that the hard drive 
comes from one of these makers.  At the typical price point, it is 
likely that the quality of the drives will be the same.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/