Hey all,
I need to add another pony to my stable (for my iMac) and I thought I'd ask everyone's opinion here. I have three Lacie Quadra external hard drives and I love them, but Lacie no longer makes the Quadra and the new Lacie drives I've looked at on Amazon have Seagate innards and do not have the best reviews as far as longevity.
I also have an 8TB GDrive hard drive that I like that is a little over a year old but looking at GDrive reviews on Amazon there are some that are a bit disconcerting. GDrive no longer makes an 8TB drive but instead makes a 10tb. Some of the reviews on the 10tb GDrive claim that because of the larger size the drive has a slow writing speed, and there are some reviews that tell of an untimely death when the units are still fairly new.
Whenever I get a new hard drive I alocate my previous drive for backup of the newly acquired one, so I will use the 8tb GDrive as a backup.
Question: Is GDrive still a good company (better than Lacie?) AND... would two smaller drives be better than one larger one? IE; would two 4TB drives be a better choice than one 8tb (or 10tb)? I like the higher capacity but worry about having all my eggs in one basket should the main drive fail (even though I always have duplicate files on backup drives.) Plus, the 4tb drives might be a bit faster for file transfers???
Others have suggested RAID drives for redundacy, but with a RAID both drives are always running, whereas my backup drives are not operating unless I am adding to them. I tend to think that every hour that a drive runs is an hour off of its life, so I treat backup drives as storage only. Is this a good way to go about this?
Thanks to everyone in advance for the input.
ONT