Good 1TB External HD

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fredtgreco

fredtgreco

Vanilla Westminsterian
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I'm looking for a new external drive for backups at the office (possibly connected via network).

What recommendations does anyone have? Is there a site with detailed reviews of external drives?
 
I have an Apple Time Capsule. It is a hard drive and wireless router (802.11n). It is very good. If you have a Mac, it will automatically back up every hour.
 
We've got a Seagate Free Agent, and it's really excellent -automated backups can be scheduled whenever, or if you want to do it now, it's a quick operation.

NO problems at all (it's only been 6 months) but it seems to be a great product, and relatively inexpensive. They've got up to 1.5TB now.
 
caoclan said:
I have an Apple Time Capsule. It is a hard drive and wireless router (802.11n). It is very good. If you have a Mac, it will automatically back up every hour.
Click to expand...

How much does such a wondrous thing cost?
 
Berean said:
fredtgreco said:
I am not looking for anything Apple or Mac.
Click to expand...

Most external hard drives will work with PC's or MACs. They're usually pre-formatted FAT32 which both OS's can read and write to.
Click to expand...

Yes, but I would believe that would not be the case with an Apple product. I certainly don't need Apple Time Machine software, and don't want to pay 4x-5x the price for an Apple logo. 1TB drives (and even some 1.5TB) are running about $100-$150.
 
fredtgreco said:
gene_mingo said:
you might want to look into some hot swappable enclosures as well.


Kingwin 3.5" SATA Internal Hot Swap Rack with RAID-3 Drive Bays KF-3000-BK at TigerDirect.com

Then you can really get some good space for back-up and then pull the drives when full.
Click to expand...

Josh,

How hard is this to set up? I have no idea what RAID is. I've put a 3.5 drive in an external enclosure once.
Click to expand...

That's a good idea.

RAID comes in many flavors Fred. The nice thing about some RAID implementations is that you have redundancy built into the stripe set so that, if one drive fails, you don't lose your data. The idea with this device is that it's hot swappable which means it's probably RAID 5.

RAID arrays are pretty easy to set up - you pop your drive in and it adds the drive to the stripe set.

Check out wikipedia to get a better understanding of RAID. It's a good idea for important data. And, again, you could buy 3 1.5TB drives and a RAID controller for less than the monstrously priced 1 TB Apple product.
 
... but the Time capsule is so cool. But, really, aside from the name, part of the price is the dual band 802.11n wireless router.
 
fredtgreco said:
gene_mingo said:
you might want to look into some hot swappable enclosures as well.


Kingwin 3.5" SATA Internal Hot Swap Rack with RAID-3 Drive Bays KF-3000-BK at TigerDirect.com

Then you can really get some good space for back-up and then pull the drives when full.
Click to expand...

Josh,

How hard is this to set up? I have no idea what RAID is. I've put a 3.5 drive in an external enclosure once.
Click to expand...

RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, it takes the three separate drives and makes them look like one to the OS. Not to hard to set up. Most OS's can use or use Raid set ups.

-----Added 5/8/2009 at 10:01:11 EST-----

Fred,
I think that the hot swap RAID set-up is the best bang for the buck when it comes to external HD storage. Personally I am looking at that 3 drive unit and using an old HP proliant server for all my home network needs and them some. It should work very well in a business environment as well.
 
gene_mingo said:
fredtgreco said:
gene_mingo said:
you might want to look into some hot swappable enclosures as well.


Kingwin 3.5" SATA Internal Hot Swap Rack with RAID-3 Drive Bays KF-3000-BK at TigerDirect.com

Then you can really get some good space for back-up and then pull the drives when full.
Click to expand...

Josh,

How hard is this to set up? I have no idea what RAID is. I've put a 3.5 drive in an external enclosure once.
Click to expand...

RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, it takes the three separate drives and makes them look like one to the OS. Not to hard to set up. Most OS's can use or use Raid set ups.
Click to expand...

OK. So assuming I bought (for example) the interface linked above. Would it follow that:

  1. I buy 3 1TB drives and put them in the interface
  2. The OS would recognize it as one 1TB drive (drive "E" for example)
  3. The data backed up would be the same on each of the physical drives, giving me triple backups
  4. Would I have get special backup software? I'm not fond of Ghost, which I am currently using. I've had better experience with the Vista Ultimate Backup Manager. (Does Windows 7 have a backup?)
Let me ask a related question. Suppose I wanted to create a kind of "networked" storage for 2-3 PCs in my office. Could I do that with the RAID setup? Would I just have to make sure the drives were visible on the network (i.e. connect them to a networked always on computer)?

This discussion is helpful. I'm trying to get to the practical solution. I just bought a new laptop with a 320 GB HD (7200 rpm). My current external can't really handle that backup size (it is 300GB itself). I also have two other PCs at the office that I'd like to get a better backup system for.
 
fredtgreco said:
gene_mingo said:
fredtgreco said:
Josh,

How hard is this to set up? I have no idea what RAID is. I've put a 3.5 drive in an external enclosure once.
Click to expand...

RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, it takes the three separate drives and makes them look like one to the OS. Not to hard to set up. Most OS's can use or use Raid set ups.
Click to expand...

OK. So assuming I bought (for example) the interface linked above. Would it follow that:

  1. I buy 3 1TB drives and put them in the interface
  2. The OS would recognize it as one 1TB drive (drive "E" for example)
  3. The data backed up would be the same on each of the physical drives, giving me triple backups
  4. Would I have get special backup software? I'm not fond of Ghost, which I am currently using. I've had better experience with the Vista Ultimate Backup Manager. (Does Windows 7 have a backup?)
Let me ask a related question. Suppose I wanted to create a kind of "networked" storage for 2-3 PCs in my office. Could I do that with the RAID setup? Would I just have to make sure the drives were visible on the network (i.e. connect them to a networked always on computer)?

This discussion is helpful. I'm trying to get to the practical solution. I just bought a new laptop with a 320 GB HD (7200 rpm). My current external can't really handle that backup size (it is 300GB itself). I also have two other PCs at the office that I'd like to get a better backup system for.
Click to expand...

There are all kinds of back-up schemes you can use with a RAID. If you wanted to could use it for triple back-up or single and have all three drives look like one 3 TB. You should be able to use the software of your choice as long as it can back-up to a external or networked drive.

Yes you can network the RAID drive. In fact this is what its primary application is for. I am going to use an old HP Proliant server, which I can get for around $60 on ebay, as my server for file sharing on the network.

-----Added 5/8/2009 at 10:20:30 EST-----

Fred when you start having 3 plus computers in an office and back-up of files is critical, then you might seriously consider a file server, where you store all you networked computers working files and then you only need to back-up the files on the server rather than backing up 3 or 4 separate computers.
 
gene_mingo said:
Fred when you start having 3 plus computers in an office and back-up of files is critical, then you might seriously consider a file server, where you store all you networked computers working files and then you only need to back-up the files on the server rather than backing up 3 or 4 separate computers.
Click to expand...

I've thought about it, but have not wanted to maintain that kind of setup yet. As of yet, the working files are less than 2-3GB. So my backup system is:

  • the three PCs themselves
  • Dropbox
  • two External drives at the office (one for each of two PCs)
  • one External drive at my home to backup one of the PCs (mine)
Maybe not the best solution (I'm open) but I think pretty safe from disaster.
 
fredtgreco said:
gene_mingo said:
fredtgreco said:
Josh,

How hard is this to set up? I have no idea what RAID is. I've put a 3.5 drive in an external enclosure once.
Click to expand...

RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, it takes the three separate drives and makes them look like one to the OS. Not to hard to set up. Most OS's can use or use Raid set ups.
Click to expand...

OK. So assuming I bought (for example) the interface linked above. Would it follow that:

  1. I buy 3 1TB drives and put them in the interface
  2. The OS would recognize it as one 1TB drive (drive "E" for example)
  3. The data backed up would be the same on each of the physical drives, giving me triple backups.
Click to expand...

Not quite Fred. If it's RAID 5 then the 3 1 TB drives would appear to the OS as 2 GB. With RAID 5, for every X drives that you have in the stripe set, 1/X of each drive contains the data necessary to reconstruct all the data if one of the hard drives fails. This means that, with 3 drives, 1/3 of each drive contains the redundant information needed to reconstruct the data in the event of a drive failure.

In summary, you have redundancy across the entire array but not "triple redundancy". This is OK because with MTBF of about 10,000 hours, the chances of two HDD failing simultaneously are extremely low.
 
I got a SimpleTech 1Tb for $130 @ BJ's. It can be used out of the box for PC or reformatted for Mac. You can use their back up software, or just dump stuff whenever you want on the Mac setup. I don't use a PC at home, but I guess you can do the same.
 
Semper Fidelis said:
fredtgreco said:
gene_mingo said:
RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, it takes the three separate drives and makes them look like one to the OS. Not to hard to set up. Most OS's can use or use Raid set ups.
Click to expand...

OK. So assuming I bought (for example) the interface linked above. Would it follow that:

  1. I buy 3 1TB drives and put them in the interface
  2. The OS would recognize it as one 1TB drive (drive "E" for example)
  3. The data backed up would be the same on each of the physical drives, giving me triple backups.
Click to expand...

Not quite Fred. If it's RAID 5 then the 3 1 TB drives would appear to the OS as 2 GB.
Click to expand...

:) That'd be like RAID 5000, wouldn't it, Rich? :)

3 1TB drives appearing as 2 GB?

Seriously RAID is great, but not a good backup replacement... you still ought to back your data up. I like RAID 10 myself (but you lose a factor of two - i.e. four 1TB disks appear as 2TB) for performance reasons, but RAID 5 is good and I wouldn't go with 1 or 0 anymore (I don't think).
 
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