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.
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.