External Hard Drives

I need one to store a media files and word documents. I was thinking somewhere in the 500-1000gb range. What features should I be looking for? I hear there are problems w/ solid state ones getting all slow after a while because they don't delete/move information efficiently.

Any advice?

 

I have a Western Digital book drive. They are tolerable. Not the best. But cheap and reasonably fast. I use it as a backup for files and such. (So I can keep the laptops relatively clear and back up the family pictures for safekeeping.)

 

Dont waste money on a 1TB HD. Unless you have large databases or 10's of thousands of songs and movies 1000 gigs is not needed. I would suggest buying a warranty if its cheap I got a 2 year warranty through staples on my PHD for 25 bucks.

 

If you look at the frys electronics weekend ads you'll probably snag a nice one in a couple of weeks. I picked up a 1tb one for $73 bucks about a month ago.

 

These HD's are maybe $100. Where exactly is the "waste"?

My advice is to get a Seagate 1.5TB Sata2 drive at Newegg for $109 and a SATA2 to USB connector of some sort.
You can NEVER have too much space, and it is really inexpensive now.

 

I don't know that you want a SSD that large. The 1TB drives I've seen are in the $3000-5000 range, which is a little bit ridiculous. The inherent problem with solid state drives is if you have alot of disk I/O, which I guess if you are just saving docs and media files is not that big of a deal.

Anyway. I have a 360GB Seagate notebook USB drive. The nice thing about it is that it doesn't need any external power. I have about 150 moives (mostly about 700MB a piece up to 4-6GB in size), 100 songs or so and various documents.

I keep it attached to my PS3 to watch the movies and listen to music. Seems to be plenty large enough for my needs and is highly portable if I want to take it on the road with me.

 

My recommendation is not to get one exernal drive but a minimum of two and mirror them. I have 2 750GB externals, and 3 500GB externals. One of the 500GB is a My Book Essential and runs off the USB power. This is the one I take with me when I'm on the road and is a backup of my most used data. The others are used as backup drives for each other. One 500GB and one 750GM are directly accessed while the others are real-time mirrors of them. Drives fail, have a backup. No reason not to considering they are so cheap!

 

The world is ending. Cannoli made a post that actually made sense!!!!

AHHHHHHHH

 

Well, if the world is in fact ending you'd better make sure to schedule a backup of all your important data on an external drive just in case.

 

My good deed is done for 2009

I'll probably make sense again in 2012 just to shake things up

 

With 3 days to spare!!!!

 

I use the My Books as well. I have 3 of the Tarabytes and I have no idea anymore of the 500 gigs. I don't mirror them like mentioned above, when the season is over I just stick it in the closet. I've been doing it for years and I've had no problems yet whatsoever. I used to archive on DVD's but that was costly and time consuming, hence, a new hard drive for every season.

 

agree.

 

I would go with one of the Link Station Quads for an external drive the 6TB is the best price point, but the 8TB is nice. Remember to change the drive format over to RAID5, which loses you 25% of the space. The reality is after 1TB, you should be on a RAID system to prevent data loss.
In addition you can access all the files though the FTP server and even control what different people have access to. This is cool as you can just access the drive as if you were on your home network. Sure transfer of the files is not going to be to fast, but in honesty, do you need access to 500GB's of files at one time???

Check out the info on FTP File sharing of the Link Station Quads : http://www.buffalotech.com/technology/buffalo-advantage/web-access

Then if you then need to carry some bigger files, you can use a 128GB Flash Drive. 128GB is a good size, the speed is fast and it's small and fits into a pocket or computer case very nicely.

 

There's a lot of misinformation about current SSDs out there. Disk I/O is what they excel at and are designed for, especially reads, but writes as well to some extent. The throughput and response times are off the charts compared to traditions HDDs, even in RAID.

SSD's are prime for operating system installs, applications, and databases but not large static files such as movies, mp3s, etc. They're still not reasonably priced for large storage. 64-128gb is a fair compromise, but again they're designed for fast access and response.

The write issues that cause stuttering (ie slowness) have mostly been circumvented by large controller based cache on the drives. Eventually you do see performance degradation as the drive fills and lots of deletes have been performed, but the drives available today will still be faster than HDD's even when they've been severely fragmented. With windows 7 TRIM and the controllers on higher end disks (Intel, Indilinx ) things have improved quite a bit from the drives available just a year ago.


Back on topic though, for media files and docs get the largest hard drive drive you can for the amount of money you want to spend and call it a day. Seagate has had a bad wrap, but pretty much any of the big manufacturers are going to give you a near identical product in terms of performance and reliability on a consumer drive. SATA2 and 16-32MB of cache should be about all you need. I personally like Western Digital drives, but have used others as well.

 

AHEM ...

You've had problems in the past (because I had it fixed for you).

You will have problems in the future ... if you don't take simple precautions.

If you don't place any value on the data stored, a single drive is OK. If you do value the data, I'd suggest a mirrored setup (RAID1). And if you are really the cautious type, back that up to another drive that is stored off site (bank safety depost boxes are good for this).

 

You could just setup a robocopy script to kick off at night and copy new files from Drive A to Drive B. In fact you could archive data from many drives to a single external drive this way. That way you aren't sitting there with two 1TB drives with a total of 50GB of data on it.

 

A good plan. I like to keep my large and valuable refrigerator magnet collection in my safe deposit box. It's the one right in the middle of all the boxes.

 

Buy at least 1TB. Because of the low cost, anything less doesn't even make sense. Go to amazon.com or some other site that has numerous user reviews and check those before you buy. Several of the external drives on the market have pretty poor reported reliability; there aren't any good test data published by a reliable source that I'm aware of, but the user reviews are fairly revealing. Some drives also include backup software that is crappy, others have none. If you're just manually copying files, that doesn't matter, though.

 

The only thing I'll add is if 1) you need/want to move large amounts of info as fast as possible and 2) you plan on upgrading pc's in the near future to look for an external HD with an esata port.

Since my laptop had one I had to try it, it makes USB 2.0 seem antiquated, I even added one to my desktop.