External Hard drives

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

I also never understood why Apple use the same annoying compromised keyboard on the bigger laptops as on the small ones. It not as if you lack space on the 17".

I certainly agree about this... though the "compromise" isn't so bad... I've got used to the keyboard on my 15" PowerBook.

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

LaCie don't make hard drives [or monitors] they just package other people's hardware in slightly fancier wrappings.

Missed this before...

Who makes the "Bigger" (1 terabyte+) disks that LaCie sell so we can get them from someone else?

We've got about a dozen of them, and most of them have needed to be sent back for "repair" (i.e. replacement) at one time or other... (Actually, the newer ones have been more reliable...)

[jezzyjj]

Originally Posted by ducasi

Missed this before...

Who makes the "Bigger" (1 terabyte+) disks that LaCie sell so we can get them from someone else?

We've got about a dozen of them, and most of them have needed to be sent back for "repair" (i.e. replacement) at one time or other... (Actually, the newer ones have been more reliable...)

I think whoever they get the best deal from at the time is my guess. Look inside and read the label!
The LaCie 321 monitor is a NEC-Mitsubishi LCD2180UXwith a big price premium but a much easier to remember name.

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

I think whoever they get the best deal from at the time is my guess. Look inside and read the label!

Thing is these "disks" are actually 4 disks in a transparent RAID 0... While they may be getting the disks from standard suppliers, and the RAID and firewire/usb controllers are probably made by someone else too, there's no-one else who have put them all together in this particular combination.

Basically I think you're being a little unfair to LaCie. While many of their products are fairly "off-the-shelf", there's some true innovation in their product line-up.

[jezzyjj]

Originally Posted by ducasi

Basically I think you're being a little unfair to LaCie. While many of their products are fairly "off-the-shelf", there's some true innovation in their product line-up.

Why am I being unfair, I just pointed out that they repackage/relabel other people's goods, sometimes in interesting ways, other times it's simply changing the brand name as with the monitors.
I should point out that I do own LaCie products, I'm looking at two of their monitors at this moment and have a mini ext hard drive for my laptop. Which as I mentioned before is not as well designed for purpose as the WD HD I also have.

[Seahorse]

Well I can't find fault with LaCie or their suppliers. I have terrible experiences with other brands (seagate).

And as for monitors the LaCie electron Blue 22inch has always been regarded as being one of best on the market for Graphics. Most studios prefer this or the Mitsubishi Diamontron.. or if they've £2K, a Barco

[RogerR]

Back on topic (booring!) Maplin have a seagate 250GB usb2 HD with ext PSU (wall wart) for 'bout £90, its in their offers at the moment. Buy 2 and back one up on the other as well!

[bobgadjet]

for what it's worth UP, I have 4 LaCie ex drives, 2 x 160 & 2 x 250.
I paid less than £80 each, and all were "B" grade from Watford Electronics.
As "B" grade they were brand new, maybe not in a box, but still with a full warranty.
They perform adequately for me holding in excess of 35,000 tracks on each, plus other files I need to back up.
Theya re as easy to use as your main hard drive in your PC.
Dont fall into the trap of segmenting the drive tho, it's just not worth it and may give you problems.

Once you plug in your PC will recognise it, then paste a shortcut onto your desktop and you can exchange files to/from it like you would on the internals of your existing PC.
I can show you at Camber if you like.

P.S.
Thanks for welcoming my Niece, Mich Mosh.

[jezzyjj]

On the subject but with a twist, anyone know how to mirror two separate external hard drives connected thru USB/Fire Wire.
I alway copy my work /images to 2 different drives for safety but at home all my data drives are RAID Mirrored which is so much faster than copying data to 2 separate HDs and more importantly less prone to cockups and forgetting which hard drive version is the most up to date.

I know you can buty external RAID arrays but I need two small and light drives that I can pack separately when travelling.

It can take 1-2 hrs to copy annotate and back up a days photography, very tedious.

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

On the subject but with a twist, anyone know how to mirror two separate external hard drives connected thru USB/Fire Wire.

You looking for a software RAID solution, or just a way to help kept one disk the same as another?

Assuming we're still talking about Macs, Disk Utility can set up software-based RAID mirrors.

For manual mirroring, rsync & RsyncX could be what you're looking for.

[jezzyjj]

No PCs here I'm afraid. Mac laptop ergonomics suck, they look pretty though. But more importantly the screens are behind compared to the X-Blacks at the moment and for doing photography the best screen was a priority. Still crap compared to a CRT though.

Software RAID would be a solution, though it doesn't have a high reputation and what about keeping them identical if at times only one will be plugged in? Incremental backing up may be an alternative, but not as neat as two identical Mirrored drives

[ducasi]

I don't know what the options are on Windows...

Got to say that although the "X-Black" screens are great quality – they're a total nightmare with reflections. Something that most normal LCDs don't have a problem with.

[El Salsero Gringo]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

I alway copy my work /images to 2 different drives for safety but at home all my data drives are RAID Mirrored which is so much faster than copying data to 2 separate HDs and more importantly less prone to cockups and forgetting which hard drive version is the most up to date.

RAID mirroring, and having two separate drives where you copy one to the other, solve two distinct problems. After all, if you have RAID mirroring and you delete a file by mistake (or an application goes crazy and saves over your work) then with RAID both copies are gone...

[jezzyjj]

Originally Posted by ducasi

Got to say that although the "X-Black" screens are great quality – they're a total nightmare with reflections. Something that most normal LCDs don't have a problem with.

Less often a problem than you think in reality but when there is an issue it's a pain.

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

Less often a problem than you think in reality but when there is an issue it's a pain.

I've used a few Sony laptops... long enough to know it's a big enough problem for me that I wouldn't want to own one of them.

[jezzyjj]

Originally Posted by El Salsero Gringo

RAID mirroring, and having two separate drives where you copy one to the other, solve two distinct problems. After all, if you have RAID mirroring and you delete a file by mistake (or an application goes crazy and saves over your work) then with RAID both copies are gone...

I've used RAID at home for a long time and find it's far less of a problem that keeping two drives identical manually which only leads to horrendous time wasting checking that latest versions of files being worked on are in both places. And then having to delete twice when tidying. The only time I've seriously lost data was actually when using two separate drives and still not entirely sure why.

At the moment I download from CF to D drive on Laptop, annotate and sort files there, then copy to to my LaCie and then to my WD ext HD, after checking all files are identical on all 3 HDs I then delete off laptop and CF card. I previously checked CF and D drive were identical b4 annotating. Tedious.
But safest way I've found at moment. I've had lots of HDs and even CFs fail on me, so I'm very, very paranoid.

[jezzyjj]

Originally Posted by ducasi

I've used a few Sony laptops... long enough to know it's a big enough problem for me that I wouldn't want to own one of them.

Biggest problem I have with Laptops is when you tilt the screen back a few degrees the brightness changes very dramatically.

[ducasi]

Originally Posted by jezzyjj

Biggest problem I have with Laptops is when you tilt the screen back a few degrees the brightness changes very dramatically.

As a photographer, I guess you're looking for different characteristics than the rest of us though...

[jezzyjj]

Originally Posted by ducasi

As a photographer, I guess you're looking for different characteristics than the rest of us though...

I don't think being a photographer is the reason. And bear in mind storing Photos were part of original question. It's more because with HDs it's not if it will fail, it's when it will fail. I'm very paranoid about losing Data and have had every form of storage media I've used fail at some point.
And if you are usimg HDs for storing your music collection on, think how many tunes you could lose if your 300G drive fails.