External hard drive

simm

Need to purchase an external HD to backup my laptop. Bought a Toshiba Canvio 750 gig last December but it has stopped working after. Anyone have positive experience with any brand in particular? With the recent increases in HD prices I would like to get a 500 gig that will last and replace with a larger one once prices drop again. Thanks.

thsmith

Seagate, buffalo are both good portable drives but for what you will pay for a 500g you can get a 1.5tb for not a lot more.

shack

All my external drives are Western Digital. I have 5 that I use to store photos on. A couple are several years old. Not a single failure (yet - I hope this thread doesn't jinx me).

WilliamM2

simm wrote: »

Need to purchase an external HD to backup my laptop. Bought a Toshiba Canvio 750 gig last December but it has stopped working after. Anyone have positive experience with any brand in particular? With the recent increases in HD prices I would like to get a 500 gig that will last and replace with a larger one once prices drop again. Thanks.

Have you opened it up? You can probably just replace the drive that's there with the brand of your choice, I prefer Samsung F3's for 3.5 drives (won't be available much longer). I've found all 2.5 drives to be less reliable.

You could also get your own enclosure, these seem to last forever:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173042

One thing about buying them pre-assembled, you never know what's inside.

Glowrdr

Are you looking at just replacing the drive inside, or the whole unit? I bought an Acomdata 750gig drive for like $100 a few years ago. Opened it up and realized it had a Samsung Spinpoint drive in it. I bought the whole unit cheaper than I could have just got the OEM bare drive. lol

simm

I am planning to replace the whole unit- truthfully didn't realize that replacing the internal drive was an option. It looks like either Seagate or Western Digital are the way to go. Thanks

cfrizz

I have always gone with Iomega for external hd. Right now all of my back up go to a 1TB Iomega Prestige.

simm

Keiko wrote: »

If you can get by until after the new year, prices are rumored to drop. The flooding in Taiwan caused a shortage and an increase in costs, so if you can, wait a little while.

The cheap part of me wants to wait but if I by some chance my HD crashed I would be looking at months of reburning close to 900 CD's. The cheap part usually wins out on things like this........

Syndil

simm wrote: »

The cheap part of me wants to wait but if I by some chance my HD crashed I would be looking at months of reburning close to 900 CD's. The cheap part usually wins out on things like this........

And this is why I am going to recommend a NAS with RAID instead of an external HDD. If a HDD fails in the NAS (assuming you are using at least RAID 1 or 5) you don't lose your data.

It's all about redundancy with backups, and I recommend at least three copies. With your current solution using a single external drive, you have only two copies--the backup and the original. And like you said, once the external drive goes bad, the only copy you are left with is the original. You could also get more than one external drive and swap them out for consecutive backups, but that solution means that you may lose a period of time of work, depending on which of the drives fails.

Anyway, many ways to skin the cat depending on what your budget is and how critical your data is.

BeefJerky

Syndil wrote: »

And this is why I am going to recommend a NAS with RAID instead of an external HDD. If a HDD fails in the NAS (assuming you are using at least RAID 1 or 5) you don't lose your data.

It's all about redundancy with backups, and I recommend at least three copies. With your current solution using a single external drive, you have only two copies--the backup and the original. And like you said, once the external drive goes bad, the only copy you are left with is the original. You could also get more than one external drive and swap them out for consecutive backups, but that solution means that you may lose a period of time of work, depending on which of the drives fails.

Anyway, many ways to skin the cat depending on what your budget is and how critical your data is.

Good advice here. Also, if you went with two separate hard drives, you could simply copy to both at each backup. Either way, I recommend unplugging your backup drive(s) between usage to mitigate the risk of damage from power problems.

Also, another thing to consider, is just get a couple of inexpensive USB flash drives that are big enough for your really important data. This could even be in addition to your hard drive backups.

Strong Bad

I have the Drobo FS with five 2tb HDs inside. I have it configured with 2 drive redundancy, which yields roughly 5 3/4 TBs of usable space. It goes directly into the back of my iMac via Firewire 800. I had a drive fail about 2 months back and it didn't skip a beat. Got the drive replaced by WD under warranty, hot swapped it and it rebuilt the drive...without skipping a beat. It's pricey though, but for me, the loss of my data would be far worse.

http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-fs/index.php

mshan242700

I would get an OEM hard drive from somewhere like Newegg that has at least 2 year warranty (retail external hard drives only have 1 year warranty I think). WDC etc. used to have 3 year warranty, but I think they are reducing to 2 years next year ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/with-hard-drives-in-short-supply-seagate-and-western-digital-slash-warranties/7186 )

Then find a decent enclosure for it, with a fan if you want to have drive extra cool and can tolerate fan noise.

codyc1ark

Keiko wrote: »

Remember the old Iomega Zips? I forgot I had one, til now. :redface:

I think I've got one of those laying around somewhere.... 140meg, something like that?

cfrizz

Yep, I have one tucked away somewhere here, and gave another one to a friend of my with all of my discs.

Keiko wrote: »

Remember the old Iomega Zips? I forgot I had one, til now. :redface: