Mac Forum / Country Specific / Australian Mac Group / September 2007

Frankly, any hard drive can die at any time, and from my experience,
it's just a matter of luck as to whether they do, depending on the
quality in the first place and the treatment you give them. It's
interesting that google, which uses a range of external drives to back
up its data, reckons that whether you keep them on all the time or turn
them off when they get hot, it seems to make no difference - there's no
appreciable difference between them as to performance and longevity.

I have 5 large external hard drives, two of which are firewire and the
others USB2. When I want speed (for DV editing and rendering, e.g.,) I
make sure that I use the firewire ones, as they are inevitably faster on
a Mac than USB2 - but the speed of the USB2 ones is acceptable.  I tend
to use the USB2 ones more as longer term data storage so that the
firewire ones stay clear enough for large data projects where data is
being written and erased quickly from the drive.

I also like the fact that with a number of external hard drives, if you
back up carefully what really matters to more than one, then if you have
a drive failure, you can cope.

Incidentally, though some of these drives were bought online through
eBay or from Harvey Norman, the good news is that *touch wood!* none of
them have failed so far - all are operational, some after quite a few
years of pretty rigorous work.

Rifty