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External hard drive

Marlene

Marlene

New Member
what's a good brand of external hard drives? I'm looking to buy one and would appreciate any input. thanks
 
flyinhawaiian968

flyinhawaiian968

New Member
Or, if you don't mind putting the drive together, get one of these or similar:

http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-2-5-IDE-HDD-Hard-Drive-Disk-Enclosure-Case-K_W0QQitemZ230275924630QQihZ013QQ

then buy yourself a nice, large hard drive! I have a couple of these types of external drives and use them to back stuff up at work all the time! about a hundred bucks and you can have a 500gb external drive.

Just make sure if you do this that both case and drive are SATA, or both are IDE. You can't mix either of them...

Chris
 
hoppers

hoppers

New Member
have 3 Western Digi externals...circuit city or best buy always has the 500 gb ones (external) on sale for $100. I have 3 and no issues to report, just make sure you backup YOUR backups! (in case one does fail that is ;)
 
PMG

PMG

New Member
Also if ya get a external case for it and make sure it has a on and off switch........if you buy the externals already built most will not have a on and off switch,it will remain on all the time. I use Rocketfish external case with a on and off switch.
 
iSign

iSign

New Member
back up your backups is right!!!

I still use 2 Western Digital drives, but I also had 2 of them fry out just in the last 6 months. Each time I instantly bought another one, and got right on the tedious chore of copying over the data to the new one (copying from drive to drive, through USB ports took forever, so I went from the remaining external hard drive to an internal hard drive on one of my fastest computers, and then downloaded back to the new external drive through a firewire port (use your fastest port... if you use USB, don't run through a USB hub)

...anyway, I'm damn lucky I didn't put off creating a second copy of my 500 gigs of backup after the first archive fried... because it was like 6 weeks later I had another dead "MyBook" on my hands. (for the record Costco replaced them both times... but I still wonder if I should get some of Marc's AcomData drives?)

I also wonder about the SATA connections on the back of the newer MyBook's ...I don't have a port to connect that way, but if I got a pci card with a SATA port, would this facilitate much faster transfer speeds then firewire?
 
cdiesel

cdiesel

New Member
We used to use external drives for backups, but had lots of problems with them.. mainly USB issues (naming it a different drive letter if you have another USB device plugged in or something) and power supply failures. Since then, we've switched to using removeable hard drives and they work great. The only downside would be you'd have to have the drive bay installed in any system you'd want to use them in.
 
SignBurst PCs

SignBurst PCs

New Member
Checkers said:
There can be many issues with external and removable hard drives - guess how I know :(
Besides a file server with built-in redundancy, another consideration would be a NAS, or network attached storage device. It's basically a file server without a processor.
Here's a link to some @ newegg...
http://www.newegg.com/store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=124&Tpk=NAS

Checkers
Click to expand...

I agree with Checkers. While external hard drives have their place, you really have no control over the actual quality of the drive inside (unless you build your own). Take a manufacturer like Western Digital, for example. WD sells at least half a dozen different models of hard drives for each capacity. Each model has a certain level of quality (i.e failure rate). So say you buy a 250GB external drive, which model of actual drive is inside? You don't really know. This leaves you pretty helpless in some situations.

This really becomes a problem if you are using it for file storage. If it fails, how often do you really backup (if at all)? You may be in trouble.

If you are using it for backup storage, then it is not as big of an issue because the data is stored somewhere else to begin with and the data on the external is just redundancy.

I, personally, like the idea of a dedicated file server or NAS device. A good NAS will have RAID 1 (or 10) and will protect you in the event of a single drive failure.

How much is your DATA worth to you? Would you even be able to replace it? These are good questions to ask when you are thinking about data storage solutions.
 
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