Hitachi SimpleDrive III 1TB Aluminum External Hard Drive

[Fujifan]

@zzzaap

Whenever I look at a hard drive bigger than 500GB, the saying Don’t put all your eggs in one basket comes up every time.

They used to say that about 1 gig drives too.

[BigShotWooter]

@zzzaap

Whenever I look at a hard drive bigger than 500GB, the saying Don’t put all your eggs in one basket comes up every time.

I won’t go higher than 1TB. Video nowadays takes up a lot of space (10 minutes on HD mode on any of my digital cameras takes up about 300 MB).

But I won’t go higher than 1TB because of what you say. One time I had a 500GB drive go out. Luckily it was a backup of my backups of my backups, so I did not lose anything. But still, that’s a huge amount of data that was at risk. (That was about five years ago when video did not take up a lot of space, but my Word files and digital scans (PDF file, jpeg, etc.) took up about 78 GB

Losing all those “eggs” would have been disastrous since it reflected 15 years work. (That’s a lot of Word files since one page was only about 1K in size.)

[NightGhost]

@BigShotWooter

I won’t go higher than 1TB. Video nowadays takes up a lot of space (10 minutes on HD mode on any of my digital cameras takes up about 300 MB).

But I won’t go higher than 1TB because of what you say. One time I had a 500GB drive go out. Luckily it was a backup of my backups of my backups, so I did not lose anything. But still, that’s a huge amount of data that was at risk. (That was about five years ago when video did not take up a lot of space, but my Word files and digital scans (PDF file, jpeg, etc.) took up about 78 GB

Losing all those “eggs” would have been disastrous since it reflected 15 years work. (That’s a lot of Word files since one page was only about 1K in size.)

So why can’t you mirror a couple of 2TB drives? The chances of their just happening to die both at once is lower than the odds that Hitachi will acquire Amazon. Realistically, you’d only lose them both if some external calamity occurred, such as a fire or one of those pesky nuclear missiles hitting your house (don’t you hate it when that happens?). And that would knock out a handful of smaller drives just the same, so if your data is uber-crucial, you need off-site backup anyhow.

[sdutango]

I have a friend who had a corrupted Hitachi a while back, and 2 weeks ago another friend had a HDD corrupted and have to buy another one. I got him another Hitachi, wish him luck. LOL
Luckily he just use that as OS HDD and he only use it to surf the net so no critical files in there. I doubt anyone would put critical files in there anyway.

[Cornelius]

My shrinkwrapped one from Woot’s 10/8 sale is still sitting here, reminding me I blew $70. However, at this rate, I’d bet Woot will be giving these away for free in 18 months, if they keep knocking $5 off every 6 weeks!

[raheelhameed]

Does anybody know what harddrive / model it has under the enclosure?

[subft]

Can I put my porn movies on here?

[chrishart1]

To address some of the questions and postings here (or to confirm some of the responses already posted)…

Yes, the drive is USB only. It’s the mini USB B connector type. As the description says, a cable is included.

No, it’s not buss-powered, because it’s a 3.5" drive and all drives of this type are AC powered. This drive comes with a wall wart.

No the drive is not a monolith. It’s actually very petite. And it’s quite stable in the vertical position, unlike so many standing drives nowadays. (Personally, I don’t use any of my drives in the vertical position – too much of a chance of being knocked over; resulting in data loss.)

Noise level is nice and low.

I have had mine (purchased from yugster) for at least a month now and it’s working fine.

I agree with the posting that says every drive you have, should have a backup mate. My simpledrive is indeed the backup mate for another drive (a 1TB firewire drive that is the primary volume – this simple drive being the destination for a daily mirror backup).

Speed of this 7200RPM drive is very good. The time for my initial mirror backup was quite short for 900 GB of data.

The drive mechanism inside would be a Hitachi mechanism, obviously.

I think the value of this offer is tremendous. I’ll be buying another one via sellout woot (to replace a 500gb backup drive that recently failed, which was just out of warranty).

By the way, this SimpleDrive works great with Mac OSX. Obviously, you want to reformat it to HFS as soon as you connect it, if you’re going to use it with mac exclusively.

[reggaemyelitis]

@mjemjaymj

This WAS the case back when Hitachi took over IBM’s incredibly shoddy hard drive business, but in the time since, Hitachi has built a reputation as probably the most reliable HDD manufacturer in the consumer market.

I didn’t believe it myself when I saw the independent studies, especially after my bad experiences with IBM and early (identical) Hitachi drives that literally NEVER lasted more than a year, but apparently they’ve really stepped up their game.

In the interest of full disclosure though, I own 11 hard drives and they are ALL western digital. Many of them I had collected while still under the assumption that Hitachi was making the same garbage they were nearly a decade ago, but I recently built a new computer with 6 x 1TB Caviar Blacks (the SATA3 edition with the 64mb cache), 4 of which make up a RAID 10 array. WD is still fairly reliable, but I was willing to sacrifice a bit of that reliability for the performance of caviar blacks - especially since the redundant array provides more “reliability” than any single HDD ever could.

But the real point is that Hitachi’s history of building drives that you’d be lucky to have last 8 months (especially soon after taking over from IBM) has almost no bearing on the drives they build today. And it’s the construction, rather than the controller, that really influences drive failure in almost all cases. The controller is more often responsible for data integrity, transfer speeds, etc. I’d even consider buying this, except that I now have a PC that supports USB 3.0 and insist on external drives/enclosures that support it (and even before then, I’d insist on eSATA - USB 2.0 is just far too slow for the kind of transfers you might be using a 1TB drive for.)

And a 3-year warranty isn’t so bad, though again this is where I prefer the 5-year warranty of the caviar blacks (even if they DO tend to fail a bit more quickly). I remember back when Hitachi drives were still IBM, they even stated that their drives weren’t intended to be used 24/7 and wouldn’t last a year if used in such a way!

Nice info, however, with a RAID 10 array, you still need a RAID controller, which is, in most cases, an add-on, or significant internal component not found in this generic external HDD…

[digit3]

USB is too slow to move large files across to this drive from your PC. Needs eSATA like most good external drives IMHO

[drgandalf]

@BigShotWooter

That’s because a USB port only has 5 volts running to it, not even close enough to power these “desktop” size drives.

Its not the volts that’s a problem, it the amps. USB ports are limited to 500 mA, which isn’t enough for the 3.5" drives. Hence the external brick.

[SchiffP]

@amnewsboy

I’m tempted, but based on the pictures, it looks like that drive would be a giant monolith on my desk. (Is it as big as it looks?)

(Cue the drums from “2001 A Space Odyssey” music).

[simssj]

I got this on a Woot! a couple of months ago. It was the same price, I think.

I like it. It’s big enough, it’s fast enough, it’s quiet enough, it’s cheap enough.

If I weren’t Hard-Drive’ed Up, I’d do it all over again.

I recommend!

[chriscclark01]

@BigShotWooter

You mean terabyte

Yeah, I had a little blast back to 2001, when 2gb drives were the top of the line!

[xstevejx]

@raheelhameed

Does anybody know what harddrive / model it has under the enclosure?

It appears to be a Deskstar 7K1000.C model drive (HDS721010CLA332 ?), based on specs.

[mjemjaymj]

@reggaemyelitis

Nice info, however, with a RAID 10 array, you still need a RAID controller, which is, in most cases, an add-on, or significant internal component not found in this generic external HDD…

I’m using Intel’s ICH10R southbridge controller to run RAID 10. It’s pretty ubiquitous on most new motherboards, even if it’s not QUITE as good as a dedicated RAID controller. To buy a good one is unbelievably expensive…

I guess you’ve got a point about it being a USB drive, but I was really commenting on the reliability of Hitachi in general anyways

[mjemjaymj]

@drgandalf

Its not the volts that’s a problem, it the amps. USB ports are limited to 500 mA, which isn’t enough for the 3.5" drives. Hence the external brick.

This is true, but out of curiosity, how much amperage do they need? USB 3.0 puts out 900mA, and my motherboard has a feature (touted for quicker charging of ipods/iphones, lol) where the USB ports can deliver up to 1500mA, although I haven’t really looked at the feature enough to be sure it’d be viable… it may only up the amperage in certain sleep states, which would be useless for a hard drive (not that they’re designed to take advantage of such things, anyways.)

[dliidlii]

2TB WD HD at Target for $69 on BF.

[ned4spd8874]

Anyone got a shipping notice for this yet?

[cvedder]

@ned4spd8874

Anyone got a shipping notice for this yet?

Nope