OT: Good External Drive for Backups?

[So Well]

My external drive blew up last night, so I am without a backup of my hard drive. The external drive had a lot of years and usage on it, so I guess it achieved a normal lifespan. As you can guess, I want to get a replacement quickly.

Have been reading internet reviews and looking at models this morning. Reviews of the different brands and models are contradictory. They seem like reviews of CPAP masks - for each model there are people that hate it and people that like it. Of course you can't tell which reviews have been written by employees of the model's supplier.

I know cpaptalk members will shoot straight. What brand/model of about 1TB capacity do you recommend?

I am running XP and already have good software to do an image backup.

[Biggie_D]

Hey there So Well

As the Director of IT at my company you can imagine that I hear this a lot. Well the short of it is I myself prefer the Western Digital Brand (My Book XXXX). You can get them at a good price on Newegg.com or even run to your local bestbuy/stapes and pick on up. They are easy to use and come with back up software built in for the home user that I never use it I have my own back up scripts that I write using cwrsync.

Most people are going to tell you it comes down too personal preference and that is true but for me I have tried Seagates, Maxtors, and Western Digital and have had the best luck and longevity with WD. And if anything does go wrong with the drive and its still under the manufacture warranty you will have a very easy time getting a replacement from WD.

These are solely my opinions and I am sure others will have theres just wanted to give you my 2 cents.

Duane

[Wulfman]

And, I've never had any problems with Seagate drives (but have had problems with all the others mentioned).
These would be my preferences if I was going to get an external drive of that size. There are various vendors, but in my work-related job I used to use "Govconnection" (which is another part of PCconnection).......so, I looked these up on that site.

http://www.pcconnectionexpress.com/IPA/ ... cac=Result

http://www.pcconnectionexpress.com/IPA/ ... cac=Result

http://www.pcconnectionexpress.com/IPA/ ... cac=Result


Den

[twokatmew]

I second Western Digital. I've been using them for many years. For portable storage, I like WD's Passport drives. I also use a Thermaltake external SATA docking station and some months ago had a WD 1TB Caviar Black drive in it. My cat barfed onto the drive's circuit board and shorted out the drive. (Docking station survived.) The WD 1TB was still under warranty, but the drive failure was not a warranty issue. Still I sent the drive back to WD with a note inside explaining what happened. WD replaced the drive free of charge! Seagate's warranty support is not nearly so good, and I've had to escalate failures to the supervisory level to get what should have been a simple drive swap accomplished.

My replacement WD 1TB is now installed inside the computer case, and I only use older drives I don't care so much about in my docking station. DS is reserved for redundant backups and for use in fixing other computers. Drives run hotter in the DS too, and heat is a hard drive's enemy.

All this said, I do like Seagate's FreeAgent Go drives and own two of them.

[Biggie_D]

OT From the POST but wanted to ask.

Wulfman I see your in NW Wyoming would that be in the Jackson Area by chance? Just wondering since I too am in that neighborhood

[Wulfman]

OT From the POST but wanted to ask.

Wulfman I see your in NW Wyoming would that be in the Jackson Area by chance? Just wondering since I too am in that neighborhood

I'm South of Cody about 30 mi.
There are lots of forum members from the "Mountain West".......MT, WY, CO, ID, UT, etc.
(I couldn't afford to live in the Jackson area, although I did have a couple of job opportunities over there in the early '70's.)


Den

[GumbyCT]

My external drive blew up last night, so I am without a backup of my hard drive.

I have never had a problem with any manufacturer or been asked for an explanation. If it's still under warranty it is replaced.

I have a 1TB My Book I picked up on Black Fri. for $78 to give you a reference. Tho I understand things made for BF may not have the same quality and are often a different model to distinguish that.
I Can't tell you how it works - it's still in the box.

Also Keep in mind you can get some rather large size USB thumb drives these days. These can be easily stored or transported for safe keeping. Some offer password protection but that IS a double edged sword. Imagine being under stress and then you can't remember the password? ...lmbo

Most professionals will tell you anything on a spare drive is a "copy" and not a backup. They will insist sensitive data be backed up multiple times to something like a CD, DVD, or tape (back in the day) to give you multiple shots at your data. Because, as you found, drives will/do fail. Also to keep copies sensitive back-ups at "off-site" locations, in case of flood, fire, or natural disasters. I don't know if you have anything you are that concerned about?

HTH

[Goofproof]

Western Digital, My Book Essentials, I own over ten, in sizes from 500GB to 2 TB. Never had one fail, I store Digital Video on them. My only concern is the 2 Tb have software in a partition built in, before use I use one of WD's programs to remove that partition, It a pain and wastes space. the other Bad thing, with the 2TB drives, the computer doesn't like to see more than one on a system, this can be fixed by renaming the drives and assigning them a drive letter. Bang for the buck, these are good drives, used to be I rolled my own in external housings, no more these are as good and as cheap. 1TB's are the best buy unless you require the 2 TB size. Just remember to be safe you need to keep two drives backed up to keep your data safe, nothing is foolproof, to a good fool. Jim

[TheDreamer]

I kind of recently built my own external drive for backups....it was quite the ordeal, because I was buying drives through NewEgg's ShellShocker deal....where every single one of them was either DOA or has since died. To be fair, they didn't give much hassle on RMA exchange, and the replacements for the DOA drives have been working fine. The other two that have since died, I haven't decided what to do with them. When the first one started going, I bought 3 more new drives from somewhere else (Amazon) and they've just worked. So, in the end I've bought 8 1.5TB drives and done return shipping twice (the drives come to me through free shipping)....to fill a 5-bay external RAID enclosure.

Originally, I envisioned running RAID5 (and having at least a real 5TB of storage) and storing backups on it, but during the ordeal with drives failing on me (including a two drive failure incident....after I had gotten almost a TB of data backed up on to it)...I opted to go with RAID6....so only a little more than 4TB of real storage.... Still that's plenty, through the magic of software compression and deduplication...the backup software is storing almost 6TB of backups in 1.4TB of space.

And, it has come in handy a few times.....it helped in the replacement of an old computer with a less old computer...or getting over the failure of a different external harddrive.

A pretty expensive toy/project....but I've always wanted to play with something like this, the only said thing was that I didn't get the backup solution working before I lost a 300GB drive, though several months after its demise, I tried the cooling technique (didn't go for the full freezing it)....and was able to recover enough of the drive.

The Dreamer.

[AndrewB]

I'm now using SD cards for backups. You can get 8 or 16gB cards for pretty cheap. I use two and switch them every month keeping a full backup on each.

A whole lot easier than burning CDs or tapes - it's a Brave New World we're in....

[GumbyCT]

I'm now using SD cards for backups. You can get 8 or 16gB cards for pretty cheap. I use two and switch them every month keeping a full backup on each.

A whole lot easier than burning CDs or tapes - it's a Brave New World we're in....

It is...soo agreed too.

Also scary for those employers with private info.

[Arizona-Willie]

I'm currently using a G-drive E-SATA 2 TB external drive ... 7200 rpm Hitachi drives in a RAID 0 array.

I previously was using a Simpletech E-SATA 2 TB exernal drive ... 7200 rpm Hitachi drives in a RAID 0 array but after 5 months I began getting warnings from Windows that it was failing.

Hitachi makes you jump through hoops to RMA a drive ... pack it in foam etc.etc. or they won't accept it.

So I got the G-drive and then began trying to figure out how to take apart the Simpletech unit and lo and behold it began working fine again with no warnings from Windows so now I have a spare E-SATA 2 TB drive. I think I'm still gonna take it apart and use the drives hooked up internally in a RAID 0 when I get around to it.

If your computer has an E-SATA connection that is the way to go. Dunno if the Mybook drives have E-SATA connections or not. E-SATA with 7200 rpm drives in RAID0 is very very fast. I use Acronis True Image and I back up 169 GB and verify it in a bit over half an hour!!

Really smooth for game play.

[Goofproof]

The bad thing about using USB thumb drives and SD cards is the speed factor, even using a USB2.0 external drive is slow but much faster than SD or thumb, better bang for the buck too. The cheapest and fastest without raid is to put the SATA drive in the Computer, it's not portable but the speed it good. I do video (.avi), (.mp3), so compression doesn't help, the files are already compressed. A new standard is out new SATA3, the new stuff will be faster. jim

[twokatmew]

Yes, re speed! I back up to an internal SATA II drive, to an external SATA drive in a Thermaltake eSATA docking station, to a Seagate FreeAgent Go drive, and to a NAS. (D-Link DNS-323). The NAS has two WD 1TB Caviar Black drives in RAID1. My most frequently modified data is also backed up to a thumb drive and sync'd between my desktop and laptop machines. I regularly make images of my OS/app partitions using Acronis True Image, and I really like SyncbackSE for managing all my other backups. (There's a free version that's not quite as configurable, Syncback.)

[DreamStalker]

I too have tried Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi, and Western Digital drives. The WD drives seem to have faired a little better for me but not a whole lot of difference between all of them really.