Hitachi Duo Pro 4TB External Hard Drive

There isn’t a 4TB drive yet, so it’s two 2TB drives, but Hitachi will have one for sale early next year.

Two important questions:

  1. How good are Hitachi drives compared to WD or Seagate?

  2. This deal equates out to about $65 per TB of space. I understand this is set up as a Raid but how good of a price is that per TB? I paid less than that last year on a WD.

Sounds like a nice deal, however my experiences tells me to be SAFE. Meaning. I had hard drives, and external hard drives which, eventually, all POP’ed so to speak, they simply crashed. My suggestion, is to have your external drives, however PLEASE save your personal information, from pics, docu data, music, vids, or what ever onto disks also. Make a master disk of everything, and then two back-up’s of master disk if u for example are using the 4.O GB disks. I am suggesting 2 backup of a master for the 4GB Disks crash also. My suggestion for Blu-ray disk do 1 master, and 3 backup’s, for if one disk crashes then you will have 2 backup’s and then you can always make a copy from your master to restore a disk that crashed. In the end it’s a LOT OF WORK! However, you will always have lets say, your External Drive info, plus if you use 4.O GB Disk, a Master and 2 Backup’s. Remember this excludes your OS disk that u received from the computer company that u bought your hardware from, which now can be retrieved online. Yes, it is hard work to do with making the Master, Backup’s, with the addition of the External drive, however this is far better than purchasing boxes of Kleenex to wipe your TEARS. In the end, just having the External Drive as backup is not Playing SAFE.

At nearly $0.07/gb that’s a hard deal to pass up…

My pockets are shallow though.

So you’re saying it worked exactly as promised?

Not a chance.

Edit: Was up late… I just got the sarcasm.

Guys, RAID is not a backup. Raid is a crutch just in case. If you are relying on your mirrored drives to save you, then you are doing it wrong. This drive would be a part of a backup solution, but not an end all be all. RAID does nothing for accidental file deletions or id10t errors.

I personally have 3 layers of backup. Mozy handles the automatic stuff to the cloud, I backup locally to my NAS device (this Hitachi would stand in for that) and I have all the files on my main computer. The chances that all of this would go TU is pretty slim. Even if the house burns, I have an off site to restore from.

Having said all of that, 4TB would be a nice cog in the backup wheel…

To this and several other folks who have talked about how “unsafe” using this as RAID 0 is…

Some of us need the speed that RAID 0 gives for working with large video files (editing) or doing straight captures from a tethered camera. In those cases there’s a solution that’s every bit as safe as RAID 1 - it’s called buying TWO of these drives.

Just saying.

The DirecTv tips & tricks section lists add-on hard drives that are compatible with their units. This one is not listed. Why do you think this will work?

4Terabytes of storage? That’s plenty space for all my cat poetry (hey we all can’ t be Nightghost):

There once was a kitty
Who went by Smitty
Smitty would never hunt a rat
He would have none of that
For he inherited lots of loot
And lays curled and purring
On a storage device bought from Woot!

OWC falls under the ultra reliable category in my book. I have a lot of their drives and they all perform well. And they are often hitachi drives inside. Here is their 4TB version for $320.

This is a pretty good deal here at w00t

Seeing it was a SimpleTech device made me shy away from this. We bought a similar device for the office and while the basic functionality was fine, it had it’s own management software built-in that limited what it could do.

If we just bought a normal external drive, none of that would have been a problem. We kept it but just bought normal external drives after that.

Yes, some of us need video editing performance and the point of striping is supposed to be performance and/or contiguous large space convenience BUT USB storage is the antithesis of “performance”.
Just sayin…for video editing itself a single SATA connected drive will blow away any such USB storage where USB bit rates are the weak link. This unit is for mass storage & mass archiving (once shelved) not real time use or boot drives etc. If it can’t do JBOD, and I don’t know if it can or can’t, then it’s use is questionable.

Can I pull out the guts and put the 2 separate drives into my PC as internal drives? I know - I can buy that cheaper without the enclosure. But then, could I put 2… say 300GB drives into this enclosure?

Looking at the System Requirements:

Does this really only work with the 64 bit edition of Windows XP (discontinued in 2005, no longer supported) and not the regular 32 bit editions?

They told me the same thing in the early 70’s. I’m still waiting…

Edit: I was in elementary when they told me the Big Lie.

I suspect it’s because so many “wits” would type F ail if they didn’t like that day’s Woot.

But the filters are annoying sometimes.

Thanks for the post, coondogg. Could you elaborate for the more tech-challenged of us? Do you need to buy an eSATA cable? Where is the eSATA output on the DirectTV dvr? Is it the input that looks like a USB slot?

Thanks in advance.

Those pictures are not from me, great shots though! I wonder what happened to my original post I spent a while typing! Luckily you snagged a copy in you reply. I guess it got moderated ‘out’ due to content…

This was important:

My gosh you have some wonderful pictures! I LOVE the grey kitty standing up to (likely) beg for yummies!? Did you get those wonderful pics of a lake from a single camera shot or were they stitched together? I saw one that said “not bad for an iPhone app”, if that picture originated from an iPhone I am impressed (even if from multiple stitched together shots). Iphone 3 or 4? What stiching program (if any)? Very nice stuff! Wanting to not come to the party empty handed… ‘www dot giveawayoftheday dot com’ has a VERY nice offer you might like today. It is a watermark program.

Second try, my post from this morning got remoted ‘by the man’ I guess! I did want to pass this on:
My gosh you have some wonderful pictures! I LOVE the grey kitty standing up to (likely) beg for yummies!? Did you get those wonderful pics of a lake from a single camera shot or were they stitched together? I saw one that said “not bad for an iPhone app”, if that picture originated from an iPhone I am impressed (even if from multiple stitched together shots). Iphone 3 or 4? What stiching program (if any)? Very nice stuff! Wanting to not come to the party empty handed… ‘www dot giveawayoftheday dot com’ has a VERY nice offer you might like today. It is a watermark program.