On 2010-03-24 11:58 , Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
IMO: The WD drives are good, their enclosures and software are crap.
my opinion as well -- WD over-complicates things with their enclosures and software, which i think makes them the worst of the external units sold by the same companies making the hard drives; in general i avoid all such external units -- it seems that the thin margins of the bare hard drive business don't translate well when wrapping those drives in enclosures, so i prefer quality enclosures around proven commodity hard drives
I recommend and install enclosures and RAID units for Mac OS X systems from OtherWorldComputing.com (I've never had a problem with them, neither have any of my clients).
i like OWC, but i _have_ had problems; the most relevant problem was a two-drive RAID unit whose power supply failed barely out of the 1 year warranty (same enclosure with drives installed has a 3 year warranty); i learned there was a systematic problem with a bad batch of power supplies, yet it took several emails and me posting on macintouch.com about it for OWC to decide to replace it
i have had other interactions with with them that make me feel the day to day bottom line can trump long-term customer satisfaction, so i am a bit cautious about OWC, but i still consider them a good source
I plan to replace the WD enclosure with a five-slot Drobo S unit (for its self-redundancy and self-repair capability)
Drobos sound convenient, but i am put off by the very mixed reviews they get: low performance relative to true RAID units (even the S), loud fans, cheap construction, some reports of unrecoverable failures
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