External Hard Drive: fan or fanless

[bluemack]

Which is better: a hard drive with a fan like the LaCie ones or fanless ones like OWC's Elite Classic. It doesn't have to be these particular drives as these are just examples of ones with fans and ones without fans.

bluemack

 

[Rhisiart]

Go for drives with fans. Man, do they heat up.

Tip: Always stack an external drive (LaCie or otherwise) on top of other external devices and use rubber buffers to create space between them (unless they come with them).

 

[bluemack]

which are the good firewire hard drives WITH fans?

 

[Rhisiart]

I bought a LaCie external firewire hard drive and I think its a great product. Therefore I am clearly biased.

If you go here and type in LaCie in the search box, you will find two firewire LaCie external HDs (160 Gb and 250Gb). The 250Gb retails at $150.

If you are not a US resident you can scroll down to the bottom of the Apple Store home page and select your own country.

 

[bluemack]

does that Lacie drive of which you speak have a fan or not?

 

[Rhisiart]

Er no . You want this. The one's I quoted do not. Sorry, a slight lapse of concentration there!

 

[Rhisiart]

I will add a further comment. My LaCie external firewire HD is reliable and although it doesn't have an inbuilt cooling system, it has never let me down. I've run my back-up OS from it with no problems.

Well, with one caveat. If another firewire cable is plugged into my Mac at the same time (say for the iSight camera), the LaCie HD starts behaving oddly. Copying becomes slow and sometimes stalls.

It's not a big issue for me, but I could see how other Mac users might find this irritating (or has led to them to critcise the product without them knowing why this problem occurs).

 

[Timothy Gerges]

I've got one, cause laCie is sooo extremely expensive here, all i did was purchase a hdd enclosure and put one of my old 40 gigs in. Its super quiet, and my mom uses it to back up. Fire wire and usb, but she uses a windows computer, i havent tried with a mac. Anyway, this one, you can turn the fan on or off with a little switch. Even with the fan on, its the slightest of hums. Either way, it makes a raquet when it is on the desk, it kinda amplifies the sound of the disks inside spinning, but when you take it off the desk, it is silent.