Need some External HD recommendations.

I've had enough to using DVDs as my primary means of backing up data, and would much rather at this point just fully back my entire PC up to a large-storage external drive instead for convenience factor.

Anyways, I've not had any real experience with the things aside from seeing my buds mess with theirs. I know it varies much by brand with regards to quality, but are these things usually made to last if taken care of? I don't want one that would suddenly die on me just because I moved it from one location to another for instance.

I've done some window shopping among the net and the only drive that has caught my eye so far was a 1tb model by Seagate for CDN$199.

Does anyone have some knowledge on the subject or general price-ranges or what to look for? I can't really find anything better in the bang-for-your-buck department, especially considering that external drive has a 5 year warraty.


Been thinking of using partitions on one so I could boot-up a seperate copy of WinXP and perhaps Linux or Leopard for when I use other's machines (that hopefully have the option to boot from USB in their bios...) to extend its usage besides backups/media storage.

I mean, damn, one terabyte. I could store my entire DVD collection on one.

I always do backups to an external hard drive. Have a 200GB 3.5" IDE drive in an IcyBox enclosure (which I got for free), plus a 160GB 2.5" drive in an enclosure that cost me £1. The drives themselves were £40 and £30 respectively.

You could also lose your entire DVD collection if one fails. I don't go in for stupidly big hard drives - too much potential for data loss.

i wouldnt go THAT large for an external drive for back ups
as gfk said too much to loose in one go

ive eyed up an internal 1TB but it was sata and i dont know if i have sata onboard or not as my current drive is ide, but an internal 1TB would be ace for my music to live in instead of "my documents\my music" and the HDD is only < 300 gb and mostly full of mp3's

i have an external 300+gb drive for all sorts of data
back ups of my digital camera some mp3 albums and at one point the whole of the robotech saga as some discs were too damn loud to watch but it copied and played on the hard drive so i did that instead but that was 50gb? of data i had watched and didnt need to watch for the forseable so i killed it

i also back up some files, like my audio recordings via my two zoom toys to a folder on my (160gb) ipod, i have em as a folder and also synced so i can listen to em if i want to but should the 'master' copies die i have a backup in place.

You can't do this with Windows unless your friend happens to have the exact same IDE chipset on his PC as you have on yours. It will just blue screen at bootup.

My experience with Seagate discs has been pretty good.

We've had quite a few external drives fail at work. This is probably because they get sent back and forth a lot. It may also be that these drives are bad quality in general.

If you want to play it really safe go for a smaller drive, and get one meant for servers or raids. It will cost a little more than the ordinary consumer drive, but is less likely to fail.

I added an internal SATA II hard disk which is the exact same size as my main drive (320Gb). I use rsnapshot to create a daily backup and have stored a ghost image on it as well, although it's currently outdated.

I also use a external drive (160Gb) which I use for some data archiving but I also use it to store some backups on it. I'll be on a vacation soon so I just put the most recent backup on the external drive which will be kept safe at another house. In case of fire. Although I should do that more often.

If it's just for backup then I'd say it wouldn't really be necessary to have a extremely big drive. On the other hand, multiple backups won't do any harm.

About the different brands. So far I never had a hard disk from Maxtor fail on me. Seagate did fail multiple times. But that was over 5 years ago and I believe Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore :-).

If you do invest in a large external HD, make sure it's got RAID 1 (mirroring). I recently discovered that my work has a 1TB drive, but it has striping not mirroring. One of the drives then died, this has resulted in a data recovery bill in excess of the price of two 1TB mirrored drives.

Raid 10 (one-zero, not ten), is the best. It has mirrored striping and the controller can access multiple areas at the same time, which increases disk speed by 200% compared to a single, non-raided drive.

It also beats the reliability of Raid 5 by far, since Raid 5 will destroy all data if 2 drives fail.

Raid 10 is a backup system itself, you don't need to take backups if you have the system alert you when 50% of the drives fail (hopefully even when 1 drive fails).

Wrong! RAID is not a replacement for backups.

RAID is redundancy to protect you from a drive failure to get you back up and running quickly. If the data on a RAID drive gets corrupt, it will be corrupt on all of your drives and data WILL BE LOST.

RAID also does not protect you in case you accidentally delete/overwrite a file.

RAID is NOT a backup.

What happens if:

1) A powerspike fries all your drives at the same time?
2) A virus corrupts your files?
3) your partition table gets corrupted?
4) You accidentally delete the wrong folder?

YOU LOSE EVERYTHING, that's what.

RAID protects you from some physical hardware failures, but nothing else.

I have had a Western Digital Elements 400 GB USB Hard Drive for a little over a year and have had no problems, I still back up on DVD but a lot less than I did. There's also FreeNas if you have a spare computer gathering dust in the attic.

I use a seagate and a maxstor. they are both well built sturdy external usb drives.

I like my Porsche-designed Firewire LaCies. The Western Digital "My Book" product line is also okay.

And the guys are right: A RAID system does NOT replace a backup. And if reliability interests me, I certainly won't touch a RAID 0-based system with a flag pole -- no matter if it's also mirrored (RAID 10) or not. A mirrored RAID 5 (RAID 5+1/51) is the best option 'for the truly paranoid'. ;-)

But even a RAID 5+1 will not replace a backup!

what if you back up everything then vacuum seal a HDD in some bag then place in a box and store at room temperature?

Let's get something straight...

RAID can "be" a backup. You can backup to hard disk all you want. There is nothing wrong with that, in fact here in the office, my backup system is hard disk. Both faster and cheaper than Tape.

If you only have a RAID system, you do not have a backup, you have redundancy to protect from a drive failure. A backup, by definition is a second (or third or fourth) COPY of your data. That copy can be on any media you want. Even a hard disk. But, a RAID system alone is not a backup.

If you copy all of your data from your PCs hard disk to a second hard disk, then it IS BACKED UP.

If you make a hard disk copy of your data and that drive fails, make another copy, you have a backup.

Here in my office, I use 750GB hard disks as backup media. Nightly backups are done to hard disk. After the backup is complete, the backup drive is copied to a second drive. So, I have the original data on the RAID 5 system in the file server, and I have a complete incremental backup on a hard disk and a second copy of that backup drive. My data exists in 3 places at the same time. If the RAID system were to have complete failure, I could restore it from either backup drive. If one of the backup drives were to fail, I could make another copy from the other backup drive.

Incremental backups are nice, in that not only do you have a copy of what is on your hard disk right now, but you also have a copy of what was on your hard disk all the other times it was backed up as well. So, if you change a file on Friday, and then change it on Monday, then you wish you hadn't changed it and want the copy before Friday's changes, you can go back and get them.

I keep a copy of all files from every day for 2 weeks, and I keep a copy from every month forever.

Its all very well saying that RAID isn't a backup.

Backing up data is done to minimise the risk of data loss, which is what RAID does. Most people (including me) prefer to have a separate backup. Others go a step further and back up to CD/DVD, or even on a remote server.

None of the above methods are foolproof, and none of them will be suitable for everyone. Any storage media is going to fail sooner or later. Just do whatever's best for your needs.

USB external hard drives are reasonably fast and convenient so that's primarily what I use for daily backups, plus a remote server. Everything is backed up to DVD whenever I think about it (which isn't often, to be honest).

Mine is pretty fool proof. I have a centralized file server that syncs automatically once day to an image on another partition (i call this my snapshot) once a week i back up to two usb hdds. First the previous week is backed up to first usb drive. Then the weeks changed are applied to the second Hdd. Thus creating a grandfather-father-son system. Then once a month this is written to additional media and stored in our apartment's storage room which is a 50's relic nuclear bomb shelter.

I cant think of anything more i can do :D

I agree with xlsior, raid -can- be used as a backup, but it is putting a lot of faith in a single system. The biggest fear (and most likely disaster) at the end of the day is a fire.

Funny, the building our office is in is an old bank building. Our on-site backups are kept in an old bank vault. Our off-site copy is in a safety deposit box at the Wells Fargo Bank.