external hard drives...

[Marlene]

I did a search to see what my peeps had to say about external hard drives. look like Western Digital came up a few times as being a good one. what I am looking to do is to use it to save my files to rather than my 'puter to free up some space on the hard drive. I know nothing so please, any info would be so helpful. what I'm thinking is using one for my files that I can set aside each year with all my junk on it and then start up a new one so when I need files from "ago" I can just go get the year and tad da, there it is. is the Western Digital a good stable brand or is there one that is better?

thanks

 

[The Vector Doctor]

I have researched this and what I have found is that everyone has an opinion on what is best. You can find complaints about any hard drive mfr. They all fail at some point.

If you do go with Western Digital, go with the black series. Longer warranty and better performance than the blue or green series

What I would do is never rely on only one hard drive. I have 2 backups on my machine. One internal 2nd hard drive and an external

 

[MikePro]

Western Digital is the best bang for your buck

you can ebay them pretty cheap... especially if you go with multiple 500g-1TB rather than trying to buy the biggest out there (2TB+)

 

[Letterbox Mike]

MArlene, will this be attached directly to your computer or will you use it over your network?

I have an external drive on my design station, I just bought an enclosure from Best Buy and put a Western Digital Raptor in it, eSATA connection, it's fast and has worked great for a few years now. About half of the hard drives in our shop are Western Digital Raptors (10k RPM) and we've had a failure here and there but that's to be expected with any hard drive. Overall I'm happy with their performance. I do highly recommend if you attach to your computer you go the eSATA connection route, much much faster than USB or Firewire.

We also have a 4TB Hammer Storage network drive on our network where we actually store all of our customer files and common files (we don't store any job files on the design stations, only files in progress if needed). I think we paid about $600 or so for it from New Egg about 3 years ago and it's never been turned off once save for a couple power outages, and so far so good, never a single problem with it.

 

[d fleming]

I have a wd notebook that connects by usb. It just saved me a great deal of trouble. Had to replace hard drive on main box and this unit is my backup. Didn't lose a thing.

 

[wildside]

we use a terra station.

a single hard drive can and will fail.

our terra station has five drives in it with redundant fail safes in it, so when a drive fails we loose nothing and can replace a single drive on the fly. Also it is networkable, so we can access the same files from any computer in the building and save back to it at all times.

we keep it in a secure location in the building, if someone breaks in and steals the computers, we actually have lost no files thank god! computers are easy to replace, not years of hard work......

i think we paid $800-900, 4-5 years ago for it, been well worth it

 

[choucove]

Using external hard drives can work great for making backups of your data. however, I will never recommend using an external hard drive as your primary and only saving location for your critical data. I suggest them only for backup! The reason is that most of your pre-assembled external hard drives (from any manufacturer) generally use slightly lower quality hard drives and then cram them into enclosures that tend to get very hot or can have electrical issues.

Not always, but in most situations I've seen external hard drives fail much faster than a standard hard drive within your computer. This can also be caused by handling issues (being dropped or banged, electrical damage, water damage, the list goes on.) I'd recommend if you are looking to store all your important data somewhere off your computer that you invest a little more money into an actual NAS device or home server. Many of them are designed to help prevent data loss in the case of a hard drive failure by using two or more hard drives in a RAID array to copy the data instantly at all times. From there, use an external hard drive to backup all your data which then can either be moved from one computer to another or taken off site for the most safe and efficient backup.

NAS devices are a little more expensive than a single external hard drive, but they aren't that bad and will probably be higher quality and last longer anyways. Additionally, many are network capable which means you don't have to move them back and forth to share files from it from one computer to another if that ever is something you need to do.

 

[Mark S. Adams]

Verbatim Acclaim 1TB USB Portable Hard Drive
http://www.provantage.com/verbatim-97393~7VSTE1C2.htm

One of the smallest drives out there, USB bus powered, so no extra power cord to mess with, and has a 7 Year Limited Warranty.

Only $109.92

 

[tcorn1965]

we use a terra station.

a single hard drive can and will fail.

our terra station has five drives in it with redundant fail safes in it, so when a drive fails we loose nothing and can replace a single drive on the fly. Also it is networkable, so we can access the same files from any computer in the building and save back to it at all times.

we keep it in a secure location in the building, if someone breaks in and steals the computers, we actually have lost no files thank god! computers are easy to replace, not years of hard work......

i think we paid $800-900, 4-5 years ago for it, been well worth it

+1 We use http://www.readynas.com/?cat=4

Same concept and redundancy

Terry

 

[Marlene]

thanks you all for the help. I really rely on my cyber pals here for help when it comes to stuff like this and once again, I have received some very good advice which is totally appreciated

MArlene, will this be attached directly to your computer or will you use it over your network?

attached directly to the computer is what I will have.

 

[iSign]

we use a terra station.

+2

I will never recommend using an external hard drive as your primary and only saving location for your critical data. I suggest them only for backup! The reason is that most of your pre-assembled external hard drives (from any manufacturer) generally use slightly lower quality hard drives and then cram them into enclosures that tend to get very hot or can have electrical issues.

agree here too...
I've had zero internal HD failures in 14 years, but I've went through 8 or 9 external HD's or NAS drives... incl Western Digital, SimpleTech, and Maxtor... I always had duplicate drives, so in all 8 or 9 failures, i didn't lose data... but I lost a lot of time buying, setting up & copying a TB of data to a new drive each time one failed!

Now my Buffalo Tera-Station just hums away over in the corner & has me doing less maintenance & feeling more secure (I paid too much for it though)

 

[Marlene]

agree here too...
I've had zero internal HD failures in 14 years, but I've went through 8 or 9 external HD's or NAS drives... incl Western Digital, SimpleTech, and Maxtor... I always had duplicate drives, so in all 8 or 9 failures, i didn't lose data... but I lost a lot of time buying, setting up & copying a TB of data to a new drive each time one failed!

Now my Buffalo Tera-Station just hums away over in the corner & has me doing less maintenance & feeling more secure (I paid too much for it though)

thanks so much!

 

[SignBurst PCs]

+2



agree here too...
I've had zero internal HD failures in 14 years, but I've went through 8 or 9 external HD's or NAS drives... incl Western Digital, SimpleTech, and Maxtor... I always had duplicate drives, so in all 8 or 9 failures, i didn't lose data... but I lost a lot of time buying, setting up & copying a TB of data to a new drive each time one failed!

Now my Buffalo Tera-Station just hums away over in the corner & has me doing less maintenance & feeling more secure (I paid too much for it though)

Doug, it is hard to put a price on peace of mind and lack of downtime/loss due to failure. Even if you did pay a little too much, it is worth the investment if you are stable. It is hard to argue with a quality NAS device. As with anything else, there are good ones and bad ones. You usually pay a little more for the good ones.

 

[greglauter]

I really like Western Digital drives but as some have mentioned, they do fail in time. I bit the bullet and purchased a Drobo and LOVE it!. I took all of my old Western Digital drives out of their external "shells" and installed them in the Drobo, piece of cake. My Drobo has 4 bays to insert the HD's and it monitors the drive and warns when a drive is about to fail. Simple green light, yellow light red light. Really cool mini Raid

 

[Joe Diaz]

We used to use external hard drives for backup. Now we use carbonite. This way, if anything were to happen to the building, we wouldn't lose our years and years of work. I also like the fact that I can access our account at home and open all of our files there.

The problem with any external device in your building, no matter how many fail-safes it has, it most likely won't have a fail-safe against something like a fire,tornado, theft, etc....

 

[threeputt]

Marlene, our NAS is 4 TB consisting of (4) 1TB drives. Simultaneously always writing to a mirror disk, every save, every change.

They're all locked with separate keys, into an enclosure (Thicus) which keeps track of the internal temperatures, etc.

I feel reasonably safe with this setup, but one can never be totally covered against all mis-haps.

But I've got 22 years of stuff in there. And wouldn't sleep well without it.

If this building caught fire and there was only one thing I could grab, I rush in and put that little box under my arm, ripping the cables from the wall as I hastily exited.

Everything else is insured, but client files? Whew! That'd be a setback big time.

Good luck. There's tons of guys on this forum that can help you with the specifics. I can't. I'm a dummy. I always hire techs to do this stuff for me.

 

[iSign]

Doug, it is hard to put a price on peace of mind and lack of downtime/loss due to failure. Even if you did pay a little too much, it is worth the investment if you are stable. It is hard to argue with a quality NAS device. As with anything else, there are good ones and bad ones. You usually pay a little more for the good ones.

true, I'd like to add that Casey (SignBurst PCs) generously gave me his time on the phone to discuss my needs, and helped me select the device mentioned above, AND I was entirely satisfied with paying $2000 for the item, from another vendor. (Thanks again for the free advice!)

I only mentioned "paying too much" because I could get the same item for half that price today... but in reality, I needed it when I bought it, not today... and back then it wasn't available for less... so just a little of that all too familiar sting when prices drop after we purchase... but it was still worth it.

I also have a 2TB back-up at home, in case of fire! In addition I use a service called iDrive, similar to Carbonite, but for less data, it's much cheaper, so I have nightly back-ups done of just my current data & I keep that down around 50 to 100 gigs. When the current data reaches 100 gigs, I clean it out & move copies to the Tera station (where it is mirrored) and to the 2TB off-site NAS at home.