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New HDDs strategy - SATA internal and archival external

Last response: in Storage
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Hey guys I have a 8 year old tower case. 6 year old motherboard, CPU, RAM
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.21 Ghz, 1 GB RAM
My current MOBO only has 2 SATA ports on it.
1 also have a external caddy for a SATA HDD with eSATA port or USB 2.0 port.

I plan on upgrading my MOBO, CPU, RAM in the next 6-9 months and use Win7 64-bit.

I currently have 2 SATA internal HDD and am not using any IDE HDDs.
I am using 1 for a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA HDD with 2 partitions 74GB for C: boot drive and the rest for working data

My other internal SATA HDD is a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm. I call it my media drive. It is completely full of audio, image, and video files of my various personal projects in various states along with all FLACs and MP3s of music.

I have 7 external HDDs with 6 of them USB 2.0 a 1 Firewire400. some of this data has been put on my MEDIA SATA drive. Some of them are 8 years old. Some are 160GB or 400GB.

I edit a lot of audio and record a lot monthly (10 GB/month) that I'll archive the .WAV original recording files. I do some image editing in photoshop layered formats and JPEGs as well as TIFF scans. I don't plan on doing video shooting or video editing really.

I am planning on getting a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm drive and use it for working media so I can have access to all my data on an internal SATA drive and a some extra space for new data in the next year or two.
Now for me to copy over all of the data on my 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drive I was thinking of putting that 1TB drive in the external caddy and get a eSATA PCI card to copy the data for $15-20. or should I just use USB 2.0 since it's only 1TB of media I'm reading off it?

I also plan on getting a 3TB SATA drive to use for archival backup and then store it off site. With this I plan to copy all of my data to it to totally archive it and then add to it only every 90 days since it's offsite.
Again the PCI to eSATA card may be worth it for that.
Yes I know I should do backups every week/month but I can do my incremental backups once a month to a 500GB external USB drive just in case.

What do you guys think of this as a strategy for SATA HDD storage for me?

More about : hdds strategy sata internal archival external

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food for thoughts: with a PCI eSATA card for $20 you will only double the transfer speed over USB since PCI will only support SATA 1.5Gb/s speed

Once you have your new MOBO get a PCIe eSATA controller which should give you at least four time the current transfer speed

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Storage Expert

I use SATA hot-swap bays. Just pop in the SATA drive and there is the data, or there is the space for the backup. And full SATA speed. But they cost more than $20.

emerald: There are SATA controllers with PCI-E x4. These are more expensive, but could handle two uber-fast SATA III SSDs.

Thanks guys. I just came across KingWin KF-1000-BK Single bay Internal SATA Tray for $18. on amazon. I may go with that and it will be good for when I want to do 90 day backups to the drive I keep offsite.

Can you recommend good Windows 7 Pro 64-bit data backup software? (Nothing that Windows 7 provides itself. I want a strictly non-Microsoft product to do data backups).
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