External Hard Drives
- Thread starter AndyDavis
- Start date
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A lot of people will only be doing backups once or twice a week at most so it won't be powered on that often.
Having said that, this problem could come to the fore as more people are storing video on their external hard drive and playing it with a media player.
I store backed-up tv from my Humax Foxsat, plus video downloaded from the internet and play it with a WD TV Live media player.
In the future I might be powering it on a few times a day.
We've gone through more than 100 PCs here at work over the years that are all shut down at the end of each day.
From my experience, we've only had a couple of drives go and they've had sectors go rather than the whole drive at once.
We've only lost a whole drive when someone poured coffee into their laptop
I knocked my external drive and it tumbled down the stairs once, but it didn't affect it
Maybe it's this kind of idiotic damage that an internal hard drive doesn't have to suffer that's the real problem.
Looks like its going to have to be the Lacie 1TB Rugged. Looked around at some of the others - Seagate, Western Digital,... - but there seems to be a lot of complaints compared to the Lacie. Its not the cheapest, even a "normal" Lacie 1TB external drive is about half the price but it seems able to take a few knocks, which is always good thing with my kids!
I
imamartian
I back up to an IcyBox (nice blue lights on it).. and store that in the same room as my laptop (so only solve one of the potential data loss issues). I am now looking to get a second ext HDD which i will keep at work (excellent idea earlier in this thread). But is it possible to get an ext HDD that i can connect to wirelessly? So i don't have to plug in the usb cables?
I don't have a lan at home, but could i treat the ext HDD drive like a wireless printer, and copy files/directories to it?
I don't have a lan at home, but could i treat the ext HDD drive like a wireless printer, and copy files/directories to it?
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I personally use a 1Tb Western Digital MyBook NAS drive (Network attached), it sits discreetly on the end of a CAT5 run hidden under my stairs. My PC's all backup to it on a daily basis.
A Raid array is brilliant until your PC gets stolen from a burglary/break-in. The advantage of network storage is that its permanently there so your backups can be constantly incremental, and you can hide the box anywhere that you can run a network cable to. Even behind a chest of drawers works well.
A Raid array is brilliant until your PC gets stolen from a burglary/break-in. The advantage of network storage is that its permanently there so your backups can be constantly incremental, and you can hide the box anywhere that you can run a network cable to. Even behind a chest of drawers works well.
Western Digital drives come with 'Anywhere Backup', an excellent package thats fairly configurable. I have setup my system to backup specific files on every PC in the house, it retains the last 3 copies of each file and sends them automatically to the NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive (a Western Digital MyBook) upon immediate change of the file - for this to be efficient you only point it to files that you need to keep, your My Documents folder for instance.
It is also one of the only NAS drives with a Gig linkup to your network, hence file transfers and backups are swift and don't impact on your PC's performance whilst backing up.
Do not buy Lacie drives, we owned two as a company, both failed after about a year through corruption - the spanned RAID array inside them isn't a standard RAID array, its bespoke and so we ended up paying a fortune (to Lacie...) for the data to be restored.
Western Digital drives also come with a 3yr no questions asked warranty on all enclosures and drives inside - I simply can't fault them!!!!
Happy to help if you've got any more questions.
