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Recommend External Hard Drive...

Last response: in Storage
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Hi,

I've been doing some research lately on external hard drives and Lacie comes up to the top of the list.

I'm considering purchasing LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk 500GB.

I'm looking for something reliable, although these days you cannot really count on anything 100%.

Brand is not an concern to me; as long as it does what it claims.

Capacity I'm looking for is 500GB, preferably 7200 RPM.

Any advice? What has your experience been with an external hard drive?

USB 2.0 interface should be sufficient althouhg thinking about getting one with Firewire 800.

My budget maxes at $150

Thank you for sharing!

If you are willing to buy a sepate enclosure and drive, you can get 1.5TB for less than $150.

Yesterday, I purchased an AcomData Samba enclosure ($39.99 at Costco, includes shipping) and a Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB ($89.99 at Newegg, no shipping, regular price is $20 more, might just be a 1-day, or Thanksgiving deal).

See recent discussion in this forum of Wstern Digital Caviar Green.

I forgot to mention that the $39.99 for the enclosure fro Cosco not only includes the shipping, but it also includes Costco's return policy. And, if you are not a Costco member, you can buy the crittr online for a 5% upcharge. Not sure what return policy is for non-members.
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+1 for buying an enclosure and a HDD yourself. Also, I recommend you get an eSATA enclosure if possible to allow for faster back ups. If your motherboard doesn't have an eSATA port you can buy a PCi eSATA for ~$20-25.

Quote:
All right, thanks. I cannot tell you how important it is to have a backup drive just for storage. That's why I"m taking my time.

One needs at least 2 external drives, never having all connected at the same time.

kaikow said:
One needs at least 2 external drives, never having all connected at the same time.


kalikow, are you referring to RAID? That's actually a good idea.

Quote:
kalikow, are you referring to RAID? That's actually a good idea.


No.

If you have all your USB druves concurrently connected, a power glitch could ruin all the backups.

Fo my Vista system, I have 2 USB drives, only 1 of which is connected at any point.

On a windows 2000 system, I have two 80GB drives that alternate on a single USB conecttion, and a 160GB USB drive that is always conneted. Used to also have a 200GB drive that was always connected, but that drive died.

I am temporarily adding a 1.5TB drive to the Windows system to do some testing of a backup program.
The 80GB drives are not large enough to have archives from two backup programs.

I only do image backups.

On the Windows 2000 system, on the 80GB drives, I do incremental baclups. On the 160GB drive, I only do differnmtial backups.

On the Vista system I do differential backups.

Best solution

^+1.Agreed on not doing RAID on a back up system. RAID IS NOT BACK UP. It's REDUNDANCY. RAID (5) is useful for only protection against drive failures. A virus,etc will make a RAID back up system history.

Also, DO burn VERY IMPORTANT (collage thesis,etc) data to a DVD, and put it on an online storage system.

Shadow703793 said:
^+1.Agreed on not doing RAID on a back up system. RAID IS NOT BACK UP. It's REDUNDANCY. RAID (5) is useful for only protection against drive failures. A virus,etc will make a RAID back up system history.

Also, DO burn VERY IMPORTANT (collage thesis,etc) data to a DVD, and put it on an online storage system.

For important things such as programming projects, financial/health stuff, and certain Excel spreadsheets, I copy to either a ZIP disk or a CD-RW.

kaikow said:
For important things such as programming projects, financial/health stuff, and certain Excel spreadsheets, I copy to either a ZIP disk or a CD-RW.



Yes, I know, I do it too. I put files not only on my corsair flash drive but also on cd/mostly dvds, but still want an external hard drive. Western Digital had Elements for $70 (320 GB) at Fryz. We'll see. I"m not in a rush and will take my time. I'm not too worried about Brand and eventually no matter what you do, there is possibility that the drive will fail.

Shadow703793 said:
^+1.Agreed on not doing RAID on a back up system. RAID IS NOT BACK UP. It's REDUNDANCY. RAID (5) is useful for only protection against drive failures. A virus,etc will make a RAID back up system history.

Also, DO burn VERY IMPORTANT (collage thesis,etc) data to a DVD, and put it on an online storage system.



Yes, I do burn important data on dvds; some generic stuff can be put online, yes.
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