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In many if not most of the boxes there are two drives set up as raid level 0 or jbod concatenated. They get cheaper drives and don't do a good job of standing behind them. They just work for me, no drama, no issues.ĭon't get Lacie. In the end, I've been happiest with the Seagate Firewire 800-equipped drives. But they solved the problem, and the Seagate 1.5TB drives I am using are reliable and trouble free. Seagate had a run of problems for a few months, and took a big black eye for it. Having purchased and used heavily well over a dozen high capacity drives over the last couple of years, I can make some general observations - I think many of WDs external drives have had a lot of interface issues resulting in them not being recognized at bootup, requiring them to be powered down, and then powered up again before use, but that's an irritant, not a reliability issue. So for example suggesting that LaCie's drives are inherently more reliable than the drives offered by the people who actually make LaCies drives, is a very difficult notion to support IMHO. The reliability of the drive will generally be based on the quality of the drive mechanism.
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True, the case, power supply, and drive interface do enter into the equation, but not that much. there are really less than a handful of makers of hard drive mechanisms, so all the others mentioned here, like LaCie, Caldigit, etc., are actually using drives OEMed from Seagate, WD, or Hitachi.
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