Portable Hard drive
Community Forums/General Help/Portable Hard drive
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| I know there are some really tech savvy people on this forum so I'll ask here as part of my quest... I have to back up my work as well as my family photo's and video's and I was thinking the best way to go for that would be a portable hard-drive since the movies take up a lot of space making a DVD too small. I can also put it in our fire safe. What in your opinion is the best bang for the buck? |
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| Currently the 1 terabyte USB 2.0 external hard drives seem to have the best space/price ratio. They're available from pretty much everywhere, and I favor the Western Digital MyBook brand. I have several of them connected to my various PCs for daily/weekly backups and to store my digital pictures on (amazing how quickly you can burn through space with a DSLR that shoots 3.5 FPS at 10MP). If you're backing up any sort of code, I implore you to use SVN. I'm a recent convert; it's made my back-upping life 100x easier. Note that 1 TB = 1024 GB. Yes that seems large, but trust me you'll use it up sooner rather than later. ;) Now if only USB 3.0 drives will hurry up and get here... |
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| "Lacie" portables are quite good, i have owned (or used 'work's) loads of them and none have failed on me yet. Also they need no extra power adaptors (unless you have a bad underpowered laptop bus, otherwise adaptor use is optional) |
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| you can always put together your own, the external USB/firewire enclosures are inexpensive and you can get whatever quality you like, same goes with the HD's which cost less than $100 for 1 - 1.5TB |
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| A Blu-ray writer could be another option. They're pretty cheap now. Also allows you to store backup data in more than one location, which is always a good idea for valuable data. |
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| I have a Western Digital USB 2 portable drive. Particularity great because it does not require an additional power source. It uses the power from the USB connection. This was an important purchasing factor for me Equally, it's very compact and therefore no problem to carry around This one in fact (totally recommended): http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/573242 |
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| It uses the power from the USB connection. This was an important purchasing factor for me Be careful what you buy, and how you plan to use it.I bought a 2.5" enclosure for my old laptop hard drive so I could use it as an external drive. Problem was that the front USB ports on my desktop don't provide enough power for it, even with a Y-cable to take power from both ports. The whole point of it was to enable me to quickly transfer large amounts of data between PCs, importantly, without having to drag the PC out to get to the rear USB ports. |
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| Or, wait for these babies to come online. :P http://www.getusb.info/50-terabyte-flash-drive-made-of-bug-protein/ |
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| Stability-wise the 3.5" units with external powerbrick are a lot more dependable than 2.5" powered-by-USB units (as mentioned above, not all machines provide enough power for those. Intermittent power hiccups = bad idea for data integrity and drive longlevity) Another thing to remember, is that USB has a maximum throughput speed of 480MBps shared among all devices connected. the absolute m aximum transfer speed you're going to see is roughly 25MB/sec. Probably plenty speedy for family pictures and the likes, but you'll see a significantly higher throughput speed if you have an external drive that speaks eSATA (if your motherboard supports it as well, of course) And with all harddrives: It's not a matter of whether they fail, but when they fail. There's a piece of magnetized metal in there spinning at thousands of rotations per minute, and it's going to wear out sooner or later. Most of the time you'll upgrade your drive before your current one fails, but fail it will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it sure sucks to have a drive die on your without having backups. Get a 2nd drive for backup purposes, or make sure to stay on top ob backing up to DVD's! |
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| ..yup..what xlsior said..having said that, can you guys recommend any decent Solid State Drive with reasonably big amount of memory(150 - 250 Gb) |
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| I'm using the WD MYBOOK 750GB , I saved the software installed on it, formatted it for NTFS so I could put large files on it, and ordered esata cable and card to make it really speedy. USB and firewire are ok. |
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| The biggest half-way decent solid state HD's currently max out at 160GB -- the Intel X25, for example. Expect a pricetag of ~$450 - $650. Plain vaninlla harddrives are significantly cheaper per gigiabyte, and are available in larger sizes. SSD is more durable, less chance of total failure, and less sensitive to heat/shock. But bottom line: larger than 160GB in SSD pretty much isn't going to happen at this point in time. |
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| I've seen 64GB SSD's for about $100 + Tax but thats not really enough for backup. |
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| I'm looking for a minimum of 500gigs, I don't think I need a TB... although I'll go TB if its only a little more. Thanks for all the advice! |
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| Depending on the drive manufacturer, you can also find 640GB or 750GB models, for an in-between price. The sweet spot for GB/$ is either 1TB or 1.5TB, though. Oh, and one final thought: If you don't need >1TB, when comparing drives, also look at the # of platters. Depending on the drive, they'll have anywhere from 1 to 4 platters. Each additional platter introduces an additional potential point of failure, so a low # of platters is preferred when comparing multiple drives. |
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| Not related to hardware, a good backup option I came across recently is Crashplan. If you don't already have a backup program, it's pretty awesome for free! |
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| I bought a Seagate USB(2.0) 500gb external hard drive (also has a power supply) from Wal-Mart for $80.00. Probably the best thing I've purchased since my lcd monitor. |
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| I just looked and they have a 640gb for $108 Can... Its called Ultra Speed but no drive brand... thats scary |
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| I just looked and they have a 640gb for $108 Can... Its called Ultra Speed but no drive brand... thats scary Western Digital 640GB for $99.99 Can http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136306 Samsung 1TB for $109.99 Can http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152178 Hitatchi 1TB for $104.99 Can http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145293 Cavalry enclosure with Western Digital drive 1TB for $99.99 Can http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101158 ...and plenty more to pick from. |
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| I've bought this one here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-WDME5000TE-Essential-Midnight/dp/B001GT7F84/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1251531050&sr=8-3 If you don't travel a lot with your hdd, you can grab any 3.5" drive out there. Also, you can buy an empty 3.5" case for around 8.00 € and put in one of your old hdds. Did so with my 120 GB drive. I prefer a tiny 2.5" hdd with no extra power supply. It's well worth the extra bugs. |
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| Also, you can buy an empty 3.5" case for around 8.00 € and put in one of your old hdds If you go that route, make sure to get the proper internal connector (either SATA for modern drives, or PATA/ATA/IDE for older ones) I prefer a tiny 2.5" hdd with no extra power supply. It's well worth the extra bugs. the downside is more risk with finicky USB power, and more expensive for the same size. (Just recently 750GB and 1TB 2.5" drives have been announced, so at least that limitation is mostly gone now) |
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| ..what is the difference between usual HD's we all use and SSD when we talking about number of write/read times? |
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| It depends on the SSD drive. Some have low writes, (like the one in my Eeepc) but you can still write to them for years without an issue. |
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| ..what is the difference between usual HD's we all use and SSD when we talking about number of write/read times? HD's have essentially 'unlimited' read/writes, until one of the heads crashes on you or the stepper motor dies. SSD has a limited # of write cycles, but on the higher end drives it's now measured in millions of writes... Plus they have built-in wear-levening algorithms, which means that even if you overwrite the same file a bazillion times, the HD itself will keep writing the changes to different sectors so it's not the same piece of the drive that gets all the writes over and over. On top of that, SSD's will fail gracefully: If a part of the drive is 'worn out', you can still read, just not write. Your data won't disappear on you, but over a (very long) time when the drive reaches it maximum write cycles, you'll start seeing graceful fails in that it may start marking blocks as not available fro writes. The amount of free/available drivespace will slowly start going down after many years of intensive use, but that still won't cause data loss. When it comes to read/write speeds, the better SSD's like Intel's X25 and similar technologies, blow HD's out of the water with ~250MB read/write a second or so, coming close to saturating the SATAII bus (which is why they're about to come out with a new bus, for future growth) Access times are lower on SSD as well, since you don't have to physically move a head to a different part of the drive first. The only thing that HDD's have going for them are the lower $/gigabyte and the availability of >160GB drives. |
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