External hard drive reliability, advice needed (1 Viewer)

[I Bleed Black]

My western digitel 1Tb external HD bit the dust last week after only six months and I'm trying to decide what to do next. I'm not too well up on the auld technology front so I done a bit of reserch online and by all accounts there is no such thing as a reliable external HD so I don't think I'll be buying another one. I'm going to be buying a new laptop soon and was am now considering getting one with like 1Tb of storage so my question is would this option be more reliable than getting another external HD or am I just setting myself up for another fall?

 

[magicbastarder]

are 1TB hard drives available in laptops now?

 

[magicbastarder]

i assume external hard drives tend to less reliable because they'd get more abuse; i have my photos backed up on four different HDs in two locations.

 

[fastfude]

If you want some peace of mind against drive failure, some manner of RAID array is the best bet. Perhaps a Drobo?

 

[I Bleed Black]

are 1TB hard drives available in laptops now?

You can from Dell anyway, I think it's just two 500gb in the laptop

 

[Ferox13]

If you want some peace of mind against drive failure, some manner of RAID array is the best bet. Perhaps a Drobo?

Do you have a raid set up - how much would a set up start at?

I checked the link:


Drobo 2nd Generation - 4 Bay FW800 & USB 2.0 Storage Array (UK Power Cord)

As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, we've created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.

Price: 289,00€

I presume that is for the unit and you then add the cost of 4 drives - So if you put 4 1tb drives into it you'd have 2tb available to you..IS that right?

thanks..

 

[Froog]

i have this small yolk, i reckon the smaller the drive, the less chance of breaking?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0010TZR44/?tag=thumpedcom-20

external drives seem to be a constant source of heartbreak for people. I think you shouldn't rely on it for storing single instances of things, but use it as a backup, like i have all my music and photos on mine, but also in my laptop. i won't be using one as a single instance drive until they become a bit more reliable.

also, they really don't travel well at all, best to move them as little as possible.

 

[fastfude]

I don't have one, but I'm considering it for the future. I think you can run the Drobo with just two drives.

I have two external harddrives - one as an archive, holding old projects, client work and files too hefty for my laptop drive; then a second one as pure backup and nothing else, running Time Machine, which backs up both my laptop and the archive drive.

This way all my data is in at least two places.

If one device fails, I can recover the data from the other one. This has happened twice in recent years and saved my arse flawlessly on both occasions.

 

[taubstumm]

backs up both my laptop and the archive drive.

that sounds pretty cool. how do you do it?

 

[magicbastarder]

i use ice mirror on windows to manage my backups - does incrementals.

 

[Ferox13]

I was in peats today and they had a Iomega system that can be set up as Raid - I think the 2x1tb system was about €280....Anyone heard of these?

Iomega StorCenter ix2-200

 

[fastfude]

that sounds pretty cool. how do you do it?

Time Machine just, er, does it, really. OS X only though, alas.

I have the two drives daisy-chained via FW800 into my laptop and TM runs an incremental backup every hour or so.

 

[taubstumm]

Time Machine just, er, does it, really. OS X only though, alas.

I have the two drives daisy-chained via FW800 into my laptop and TM runs an incremental backup every hour or so.

thanks for that... i'm not sure i get you, though. i have almost the same setup, and i think what you have is what i'd like to have. want to tell me what i'm doing wrong?

at the mo i've got 2 x 1tb drives, one for 'stuff' (big files, films, etc) and one just for time machine. time machine just backs up the laptop, though, not the other drive. do i need to daisychain drives to get it working? how do i do that? will i have to redo the initial timemachine setup?

 

[fastfude]

I don't think you need to daisy 'em, it just saves on cables and ports.

Try checking the exclusion list under TM Preferences > Options... - your TM drive should be there, but not the other external drive. Remove it from the list if it is or it won't back up. You won't need a new backup set, it should just add it to the existing one.

Does the drive and its contents appear in the history when you browse the whole computer in the TM interface? If so, you should be sorted.