External Hard Drive
- Thread starter flyingdog
- Start date
GWguy
*
flyingdog said:
There are some drives out there, I think LaCie has a good selection, of drives that are designed for portability. Those have drives a bit more tolerant to being disturbed and transported. That said, a hard drive is a hard drive. It is a mechanical device which WILL fail at some point in time. Newer drives have gotten the MTBF (mean time between failure) WAY up, so it is less of a concern. Basically, select a drive that have a USB 2.0 or FireWire interface, depending on your computer jacks, and get the best storage vs price ratio you can. I've seen 500 Gb drives for under $150.
How serious about backups are you? You might read up on incremental and differential to see exactly what size hard drive you want.
USB 2 is the way to go, but your computer has to have it as well. Most newer ones do.
Depending on the size of the backup you might go with a flash/thumb drive. No moving parts and up to 8 gig in size now.
USB 2 is the way to go, but your computer has to have it as well. Most newer ones do.
Depending on the size of the backup you might go with a flash/thumb drive. No moving parts and up to 8 gig in size now.
jetmonkey
New Member
Just within the past month I witnessed a server with a RAID setup and a tape backup fail completely. The tape drive went down first and the server followed before they got the new tape drive installed. The server died as the data was being backed up to an external hard drive. The RAID setup recovery failed.
bobbyb
New Member
A second internal hard drive is pretty safe and is very easy to install and use.
I have a 160gig main drive and a second 80gig backup drive.
I also have several portable USB2 drives, both laptop size drives and PC size drives. All of them work well. There are a bunch of portable options. I purchase MOBILE DISK External Data Storage cases from Office Depot and Staples for $20 TO $40 and put what ever drive I want (or have lying around) in them and they work great. I have several with Laptop drives in the 80Gig range and a PC case with a 160Gig.
There are several other options and prices for externals out there it just depends on your application and how deep your pockets are.
If your backup data is important the burn CDs, they will hold over 600meg of data. DVDs will hold much more.
Remember nothing is 100% safe for 100% of the time so multible backups are the best way. Remember the three rules in the computer business: BACKUP, BACKUP and BACKUP
If your computer does not have USB2 it is worth it to upgrade to USB2. There kits out there that have both USB2 and Firewire for around $40 to $60, but using USB1 is tooooo sloooow for most applications. USB and Firewire have about the same data transfer speeds but most newer computers out there have USB2. Most USB2 drives will also work on USB1 connections but are much slower.
I have a 160gig main drive and a second 80gig backup drive.
I also have several portable USB2 drives, both laptop size drives and PC size drives. All of them work well. There are a bunch of portable options. I purchase MOBILE DISK External Data Storage cases from Office Depot and Staples for $20 TO $40 and put what ever drive I want (or have lying around) in them and they work great. I have several with Laptop drives in the 80Gig range and a PC case with a 160Gig.
There are several other options and prices for externals out there it just depends on your application and how deep your pockets are.
If your backup data is important the burn CDs, they will hold over 600meg of data. DVDs will hold much more.
Remember nothing is 100% safe for 100% of the time so multible backups are the best way. Remember the three rules in the computer business: BACKUP, BACKUP and BACKUP
If your computer does not have USB2 it is worth it to upgrade to USB2. There kits out there that have both USB2 and Firewire for around $40 to $60, but using USB1 is tooooo sloooow for most applications. USB and Firewire have about the same data transfer speeds but most newer computers out there have USB2. Most USB2 drives will also work on USB1 connections but are much slower.
flyingdog
Member
flyingdog said:
Large non-profit organization; small IT dept of 1 and not a good data recovery plan, so I'm doing my own. We backup now to the same server we have our data on
(nightmare waiting to happen). So I'm buying the drive to backup onto. It's only about 30 gigs. Do I need to worry about formatting over a certain size? I may just get a 250 gig for the price and not have to worry about space. I don't deal with hardware much so I'm not sure of the best plan. Our server doesn't have eSata, I don't know about USB 2.0. Sounds like there is a converter? Thanks much for all you input; I keep learning, learning, learning.
R
RadioPatrol
Guest
jetmonkey said:
RAID 6 ...... double redundancy
R
RadioPatrol
Guest
ylexot said:
seen it happen in a PATA RAID 0+1
Channel 0 Master HD raid 0 to Channel 1 Slave HD
Channel 1 Master HD raid 0 to Channel 0 Slave HD
then the 2 raid 0 sets mirrored to each other
I arrived to find and orange light, aka one failed drive and while I was on the phone with the office a second drive failed ..... I was able to force a raid 0 with the remaining drives -
lucky for us / the customer one drive in each set failed so with that and OnTrack Pro software and about a week scanning block by block, we were able to recover 99 % of the data ....... nothing in the db was lost, just secondary data that was not important
R
RadioPatrol
Guest
jetmonkey said:
if you lose more than 1 drive in a RAID 5 your toast ........
basically there is an algorithm, that allows data to be rebuilt in the event of a single drive failure ...... I always spec RAID 5 with an ON Line Hot Swap Spare, so if a drive fails durning the night the spare spins up and the RAID Controller automatically starts rebuilding the Array ...... but the customers always whined $$
and I put it like this, how much does it cost you $$ Per min to have 15 Employees sitting idle because hardware failed ...... say 15 x 35 - 55k per yr for the 15, adds up real quick to the cost of an entire new server, so a spare hot swap drive is peanuts
that said ....... your external USB Hard Drive, will last longer if you only run it to back up, then turn it back off ........
I got a 500 Gb for less than 2 bills ..........
R
RadioPatrol
Guest
flyingdog said:Large non-profit organization; small IT dept of 1 and not a good data recovery plan, so I'm doing my own. We backup now to the same server we have our data on
if your doing a server, I would suggest 2 drives one goes off site each nite with who ever is the most responsible ............
I have seen companies where the secretary swaps the tapes
and they were all kinda jumbled on top of the server, on a counter top, tossed in a drawer .........
M
Mousebaby
Guest
I just picked up a sweet 250 GB external hard drive by Iomega from Amazon. I paid 69.00 plus 3.99 shipping. I was also lucky enough to have a $20 gift card so it was cheap! Works great and uses USB. Good luck finding one! 