Roy writes: >You have to think about where you storage is off premises too. I use internal hard drives because they are smaller than >external drives and keep one backup in a safe deposit box.. Internal drives tend to be faster at backing up whole drive since >you can get ones that work at the speed of your bus. Of course this depends on how new your computer is as there are now >faster hard drives that my computer can't make use of the extra speed. ..Some services that host web sites provide unlimited >storage. Buying bare drives are a really good idea - why spend money on fancy cases when you don't need to.. Either attached internally and removed when backup procedures are complete or kept in removable caddies and similarly removed when not in use. USB (and firewire) as you say is slower, and various tests on externally cased drives report quite different transfer rates from company to company so unless someone was prepared to read up on each and every individual model, they'd never know whether they're buying a fast cased drive or a slow one. At least PATA/SATA transfer rates are well known. As an aside, I've also recently discovered why Mac users prefer firewire over USB, the slow speeds of USB on Macs - the reason - it seems apple's implementation of USB is less than optimal: http://www.appleinsider.com/print.php?id=3901 "testing done .. compared 2004 PowerPC Macs against 3 GHz Pentium 4 PCs; since USB pushes much of its work to the CPU, the speed of the host made a big difference in how fast USB performed on the two platforms. Their testing also revealed that the first generation of the PowerMac G5 delivered poor I/O across the board, scoring lower than even the mobile PowerBook and low cost eMac in both Firewire and USB. <clip> Additionally, Windows file sharing and disk protocols are simpler than on the Mac, because Windows handles and presents less metadata. This lightness makes for faster disk operations .." transfer rates - look up your drive! :) <http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html?modelx=33&model1=1047&model2=1016&chart=33> David Dyer-Bennet : 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. I'll second all of the above!! : From: Linda >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. >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. Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things http://tinyurl.com/6h257b posted Feb 18th 2007 at 9:47PM "When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you've probably got a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives. Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure); and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot. Normally we'd recommend you go on ahead and read the document, but be ready for a seriously academic and scientific analysis. " lea murphy: : I've had four DVDs fail. Meaning the data didn't write or couldn't be : read. You couldn't pay me to use it as a back up medium. burn rates are very media dependant and drive dependant. Some media I tested of late had reported it's self as capable of being burnt at speeds that were simply too high, certainly higher than the label suggested.. and deviating from the optimal rate is a cause for increased error rates. Both CD's and DVD's can be burnt faster than they are actually capable of being burnt so it pays to check the media. Dyes and substrates can change from batch to batch as can the place, factory or even company of manufacture - the best course of action with optical media is to treat each batch as an unknown quantity and test it to see what it reveals about it's self. Also it's well worth testing the error rates, discarding the media or returning it if they prove to high or if degradations is too rapid. tools are freely available for this, I've posted the links here before.. I know it would be nice to trust that one could just buy from Reputable Company A and be done with it, but sadly it's not that simple :( Optical drives are another matter. We assume digital devices as being 100% digital but they're not - the way lasers and other internal drive mechanisms perform is analogue and there will always be variation from device to device. bad drives happen :/ My very first burned worked beautifully and was my primary optical drive, when I fitted another optical drive to another computer I had I discovered to my horror not a single disk burnt by that burner was readable on another drive! I tested a bunch of disks on a number of drives .. nothing! Lesson learned. don't trust media or drives - TEST EVERYTHING! Computers are by far and away THE most complex things people have ever introduced into their homes - no one seriously wants to dedicate their lives to comprehending the inner workings of such things - few ever wanted to even learn how a carburettor worked or how to repair the family car when it misbehaved, but since the puters are dominating our lives so dramatically, we really need to spend some time familiarizing ourselves with some of the tools to make sure what we do with these things is as safe as it can be. I'd love to just plug it in and go, but having wasted so much time and money over the years has taught me that will never be however - Hard drives currently offer the best storage price per Gb than any other media so why bother with optical disks and their low capacity / inherent unreliability? Treat them as throw away, temporary data transfer media and use HDD's for long term storage. DVD's still do better than CD's though.. and then there's DVDRAM - a different media altogether http://www.dvd-recordable.org/Article1325-mode=thread-order0-threshold0.pht "A new DVD defect management study, conducted by Media Sciences, and sponsored by the RAM Promotion Group (RAMPRG), reveals that DVD-RAM drives provide the most robust, drive-based defect management among currently available recordable DVD formats. An optional protective cartridge offers even greater protection and reliability for DVD-RAM" Then there's the ongoing costs to consider. I'm glad I can digitise my films to have rapid and easy access to them and to be able to share images around the world in a blink, but I'm also very glad I have my film and print backups sitting there quietly :) karl currently building yet another file server and migrating yet more stuff to it! Another nice piece of freeware for the windows user - supercopier http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,69479/description.html License Type: Free Date Added: Jan 2008 Operating Systems: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP File Size: 476KB it supports pauses and resumes! :)
