David Jenkins
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| posted on 2/7/10 at 06:26 PM |
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Stand-alone USB hard drive?
I was thinking about getting one of these to store backups from my assorted PCs. It seems that you can get 1, 1.5 or even 2TB ones now for well under
£100. I would need one that worked with Windoze XP, Vista, and Linux (Ubuntu).
Trouble is - I've read a load of reviews and the ratio of satisfied customers to unhappy ones seems to be only about 4:1. I wouldn't be
storing important data on there and nowhere else - they would always be backups - so it wouldn't a total PITA if it failed. It's just that
I don't like spending good money on something that's so iffy.
Can anyone recommend a make that works well, and is reasonably reliable?
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mcerd1
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| posted on 2/7/10 at 06:37 PM |
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Seagate make some very good ones - my mum and brother both have 1TB seagate external ones at the moment
but no hard disk is totaly full proof, you should always keep more than one copy of important stuff (on sperate drives, not just a different partition
of the same disk)
Its worth pointing out that they are just an internal disk in a sperate box with a USB/ Firewire/ Network cable
So unless its for a laptop you'll get the same results by adding another internal disk drive (but without the automatic backup software if you
want that - but you sort that in otherways)
[Edited on 2/7/2010 by mcerd1]
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britishtrident
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| posted on 2/7/10 at 06:44 PM |
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NAS drive is a better bet I have encountered a few unreliable USB drives.
Rather than using Windows networking I connect to the NASs drive on the home network via FTP using Cobian Backup software --- this set up has
been running for a few years now and never missed a backup.
Using FTP rather than mapping the drives in windows networking reduces the danger of someone accidentally deleting a back up. For compressed backups
Cobian backup can use ZIP or RAR compression so reading te backups is no problem with other software.
[I] “ What use our work, Bennet, if we cannot care for those we love? .”
― From BBC TV/Amazon's Ripper Street.
[/I]
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RazMan
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| posted on 2/7/10 at 11:00 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
NAS drive is a better bet
+1.
My Netgear ReadyNAS Duo holds backups of all my software and media. It also streams HD video to my Netgear Digital Entertainer and 52" Plasma
TV. It sits quietly on the network and simply acts like another hard drive holding 2Tb.
Cheers,
Raz
When thinking outside the box doesn't work any more, it's time to build a new box
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Scotty
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| posted on 3/7/10 at 06:49 AM |
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+ 2 for Nas, mine also has bit torrent client built in, means i can dowload "stuff" while the computers off
PLEASE NOTE! All comments made by this person are to be considered "Tongue in Cheek" and are not meant to be taken seriously in any way - so there!
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Ivan
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| posted on 3/7/10 at 07:45 AM |
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Just a comment about Seagate Drives - they where the cause of all my woes - I got a drive model with faulty firmware (Google search and read all about
it) and it crashed after a year of use and I had to spend big bucks getting it back up again. Discovered that the Seagate warranty is worthless in
that situation as they demand the drive back with all your data on it and I am not willing to give that to anyone.
Once I had had the firmware restored and recovered the data and tried to replace it under warranty they claimed there was nothing wrong with the drive
so wouldn't accept it back. Typical corporate catch 22 situation - they acknowledge the firmware fault but won't replace the drive until
it fails.
By the way it has failed yet again - fortunately i was expecting it so didn't use it for anything critical.
Speaking to the data recovery company they say that Seagate drives give them more business than any other and far in excess of the relative numbers
out there (The firmware problem on series 11 drives and motor failures on several others) - they rarely if ever get drive failure faults with Western
Digital drives which they use nearly exclusively.
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Ninehigh
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| posted on 3/7/10 at 12:24 PM |
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You know someone told me that these new SATA drives spin faster than IDE ones, thus more prone to fail.
I've had a couple of IDE drives since 2003 and no problems despite hammering them both
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