It's not likely that a 1.5 TB drive at that price is capable of more
than light duty service, and I wouldn't use them for anything terribly
important.
Western Digital, for example, makes some great drives, and they make
some external drives. The great drives are the Caviar Blacks,* which
carry a 5-year warranty and I don't remember ever wearing one out. Their
external drives do not have Caviar Blacks in them, and carry a 1-year
warranty. Although I've had so many troubles with Seagate that I rarely
bother with them, their ES line appears to be just fine, while the
Barracuda 7200.xx line is what ends up in their external cases, and they
are so fragile that I no longer bother to spend the money to ship them
in for return. My first choice in drives these days are Samsung Spinrite
RAID Class drives, nobody but me puts those in internal cases.
Also, the external drives almost always have a bunch of junk software on
them, sometimes it's hard to get rid of it all.
My recommendation is to get a good external case from Newegg (about $40
for USB, $80 for Firewire) and one of the really good 3.5" SATA drives.
Get one of the "no screwdriver" cases where the drive just slides in and
out when you open the door. A few months later, buy another of the bare
drives. Archive the bare drives, noting the date and, if appropriate,
which image collection is on it.
There is plenty of good software for maintaining the backup collection,
for Windows I personally like Cobian Backup, which is free, can be
scheduled, and can maintain a mirror of the exact file sets you want to
preserve. I'm using it for about twenty users at three customer sites.
On the Mac there must be something but I haven't really gone looking,
Macs are Unix machines so I just use cron to schedule an rsync script.
Van
* One of the greatest deals going on good hard drives is the Western
Digital upgrade program for out-of-warranty disks. If you have an
ancient WD disk, even ten years old, search for "Western Digital
warranty" and you'll find a page where you can enter the serial number
to check on the warranty status of the drive. If the warranty has
expired, you'll get a link to an upgrade page where the prices on
current WD drives are a little less than Newegg's. For example, a 2TB
Caviar Black is $150, 1TB is $79, and three or four days ago I grabbed
a 500GB for $50, although they seem to be out of those today. They even
have a few of the Velociraptor drives, but even with the discount
they're expensive and don't really offer any advantages for backup
purposes. They are wicked fast (15K RPM) and suitable for 24/7 data
center operation, but probably no more durable in the backup role than
the Caviar Blacks are.
I haven't tried this, and it may involve an ethical challenge, but if
you don't have old disk drives piling up around you like I do, you could
go on eBay looking for smallish disks, find a WD drive where the picture
is clear enough to read the serial number, and upgrade it without
actually buying it. They don't require the drive back, so they'll never
know, but the buyer of the disk you upgrade won't be able to do so.
On 25/11/2010 11:28 AM, J Bryan Kramer wrote:
>
> > Also, if you go through a decent electronic discount house online (I
> > like newegg, but I am sure there are others) you can find decent
> > external hard drives aren't super-expensive.
> >
> >
> Right now NewEgg is selling 1.5TB external drives for $79 during their
> Black
> Friday sale, Target is supposed to have a 2TB external for $69 if you want
> to fight the morning crowd. There are a lot of sales going on.
>
> BK
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
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