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When it comes to external drives, please be aware
folks that the drive case is one matter, the drive within it
another
The drive it's self is hopefully one of the better
brands like the Western Digital or Seagate's and not the notoriously unreliable
IBM's - but this is the sort of thing that should be at the forefront of your
decisions when researching whether a drive is worthy of purchase. Having
said that, I've become aware of a high failure rate with WD 200Gb IDE drives
(I've had NINE drives passed to me for data recovery where they've been total
fails*)
Inside the eSATA/firewire/USB/parallel case you'll
probably find either an IDE (parallel) interface drive or a SATA (serial) drive
- both are the types of hard drive interfaces you'd find inside any normal
computer, there's nothing special about them. If it's a small drive then
you'll have the smaller 2.5" or 1.8" drives, these too can be connected
internally with adapters though the 1.8" ZIF models can be a pain.
If the external case has failed, switch the bare
drive into another enclosure or directly into the PC and see what state the
drive is in - chances are it'll be fine and will continue to serve you well for
years to come... I've a few cheap hard drive cases I've bought over the years on
ebay and they've all been decent enough - probably not total speed demons, but I
am not doing real time video editing so there's really no need for speed.
Spare cases are never wasted! they're very handy for checking all the old
bare drives lying about..
One issue that occurs with the newer external
drives that does cause problems is heat build up - the newer drives are
generally much higher capacity than older drives and use a lot more power, and
the older drives were often housed in heavier metal cases which transferred heat
more effectively than the cramped, airtight plastic cases of today. Not
much can be done about this unless you switch the USB/firewire controller and
drive into a friendlier enclosure. Heat is a lot less of an issue though
if you don't let the things get hot - only connect them when they're needed and
disconnect them afterwards! - If you want them spinning constantly for
some reason, connect them internally.. there's no point using an external drive
if you want it up and spinning 24/7.
If you want non-internal drives running constantly
do it properly and run a NAS (network addressable storage) system - either an
old PC running headless (no keyboard or monitor, just a box stuffed with
drives) on the network, or a proprietary NAS.
Roy mentions leaving his case open - I confess to
the same practice - my desktop is probably a bit too steampunk for the average
user, but the 4 bare drives spilling out the side of the box certainly remain a
lot cooler than were they all jammed inside toasting each other!
A final warning, repeated again from way back about
RAID - PLEASE make sure you're running either a striped and mirrored array or
just mirrored but NOT purely striped - striped scatters your data across X
number of drives with little redundancy - it's build for speed not reliability
- so if one drive fails you'll lose all your data (!).
In reality most people have little or no need for
mirrored raid unless they're serving data to a lot of users and need the
bandwidth, it's just another level of complexity with zero benefit to a single
user. A much easier and better solution is to just back up your data
to a second or third drive using a decent program that checks as it goes like
the windows freeware Synchback which can be customised to fit the users needs.
( http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html )
- I wouldn't bother with the pro version - stuff like S.M.A.R.T.drive checking
has proven unreliable anyway and zipping is not that useful.
As with Roy, I also clone my main drive regularly
so if there's ever a problem I just switch it and continue. Most of these
problems (2 in total across many, many years) have come as a result of problems
elsewhere, not from the drive but I've turned to the cloned drive to get up and
running again. These issues have been
as a result of RAM failure, power failure, the operating system has got
scrambled or the motherboard has died. On all other occasions when the
drive went wonky, sheer perversity has driven me to restore the system without
resorting to the clone ;)
hope this helps
k
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