Formyrotts@xxxxxxx wrote:
I am thinking about getting an external hard drive for storage and have been told that 1TB is probably way to large. I've also been told that getting one with it's own power supply would be a good idea. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what would be good? I wouldn't mind 1 TB as it would supply quite a bit of storage for a while.
I'm running two 1TB drives as external backups (alternating nights). I'm running them off a Solaris system rather than Windows or Mac, and using an advanced filesystem called ZFS which lets me do "snapshots" of the state of the disk at various times without duplicating data that doesn't change, and the fileserver that's getting backed up has 800GB usable (twice that physical since everything is mirrored). Which is longwinded and probably not that interesting to you, but is the reason why a disk considerably bigger than my fileserver is for me the right size for my backup drive (with snapshots, I can have 18 months of my monthly backups stored on a drive only 20% bigger than my server disks, because at this point most of my online data is old photos that don't change).
(I would argue that it's terribly important to have *more than one* backup device; otherwise, while you're running a backup, your old backup is partly destroyed (which usually means completely unusable) and the new backup is incomplete, and all your data *and* all your backup are online at once so a big power spike or a malware hit could potentially destroy all of it at once. You might also want to consider three, and rotate one of them off-site fairly frequently, weekly or monthly. I'm using optical disks for my off-site, hence two backup drives for me.)
The size that's right for you depends on how much you have online now, and how fast you expect it to grow. Lots of people have multiple terrabytes, and need more exotic backup solutions than this.
I would say don't even seriously consider your needs more than 5 years out; things change fast in computer hardware.
Also, any suggestions as to where to read up on the external hard drives would be greatly appreciated. Really, anything that would point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. One person has said he only uses Western Digital but some of the other brands I've seen look enticing as well. Sorry to put this to the list but I really have no one else to ask. Thank you ahead of time for any tidbit of information. :)
Most people have a bad experience, and take against the brand at least for a while. I think the two first-tier brands are Western Digital and Seagate. They aren't perfect, and they sell huge numbers of drives, so you'll find people who had bad experiences with one or the other, but I believe the stats show they're the serious drive-makers. Samsung and Hitachi are aggressive and trying to become important, and I'm currently using some Hitachi drives in my server. The two *I* won't touch at this point are Maxtor and Lacie. Lacie doesn't make drives, they just package them; and they're a small company from the Mac world, and don't sell all that many units. And I've *still* heard more disaster stories about them then any other manufacturer.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
