Category: Geeks r Us
Ok, I'm feeling like it is time to get an external hard drive. Back up some of this info in a central location, instead of spread over various thumb drives.
A couple questions...
Aside from size, 250gb 500gb and those ginormous tb models, is there much of a difference?
What brand do you use?
Do you like to have your own or do you share? *Smile,* you and your spouse.
Lastly, how about using one hard drive for multiple machines, how does that work?
Thanks all!
Size matters. Smile. A drive is like a big spung so you can connect it to as many computers with the same OS as you like, but it gets messy. Just like your thumb drives. As far as brand well that is difficult to say. Western Digital makes good drives, but so does other venders, so I'd get the one rated best buy other users. www.cnet.com will help you out with that one. Prices and all. But then their is the question of pocket deepness. Smile. AHow much do you want to pay? Label all the folders you use on it and you'll keep it from getting messy, but otherwise it is your call. There is a program that allows for setting it up and leaving it. If you use it with one machine it will automaticly back up. I'll get the name and post it for you. Personal I don't store anything. I have 250 GB and it is only 85% empty, so go figure. Lol. Music and such I use a service that keeps it just fine for me, or my MP3 player, but I don't store anything. My email is kept nicely by the mighty hotmail servers, and it has ever expanding storage, but I don't keep much there either.
Yeah, I think one would be nice. I have plenty of photos, saved emails/letters from folks, music, a couple games. Things of that nature.
We also have an aging desktop, that I may want to savesome stuff off of.
*Smile,* I have no plans to buy a huge one, maybe the 250gb or 320?
Thanks for your input.
Aside from size, 250gb 500gb and those ginormous tb models, is there much of a difference?
I don't think so. really not much of a difference.
What brand do you use?
Western Digital mybook2.0 500 GB.
Do you like to have your own or do you share? *Smile,* you and your spouse.
I like my own.
Lastly, how about using one hard drive for multiple machines, how does that work?
Plug the USB cable into the machines, and copy away.
USB for hard drives, are you serious? that's so 90's... Seriously, I'll explain the why. USB 2.0 is slower than firewire 400. I should know, I've got a laptop with both, and I've timed it. The fastest way to move data around is ESata, or External Sata. The theoretical transfer speed of it is 3 gigs per second. This is handy to backup the gigs of stuff at a time, since pictures aren't exactly small, if you leave them uncompressed. It is just like backing up lossless or .wav files.
The only issue with ESata drives or multiconnection drives is that they are expensive. And most systems do not have an ESata port, or have the raw horsepower to handle the full 3 gbps transfer speed, well, maybe a duel or quad core CPU with 2-3 gb ram.
Yes, but how deep is the pocket? USB gets it done. Smile.
Spike's pocket is pretty deep. I know that for a fact.
USB is fast enough. It took me 4 hours to copy hundreds of gigabytes onto a hard drive, for a picture or a song we are talking between .1 and .3 seconds.
I've used external hard drives for years, I have had Maxtor, WD MyBook and a third brand, whose name I can't recall, crash on me eventually after years of use. These are not perfect, but they're pretty good. Expect to pay around $90 for a terabyte drive, 500gb drives are probably in the 60 to 70 range.
Regarding a more portable option, you can go at least two ways:
1. Get a usb powered portable hard drive, the size of a Booksense, that you plug into a usb port, copy and unplug it. You can easily move it between machines, it will not be constantly running, which might extend its lifetime, you can hook it up to some tvs and display pictures directly. A 500gb version will cost you around $100 to $130, a 250 or 300gb version probably 20 dollars less.
For a lot more money you can get a big network storage center, e.g. from Buffalo, that you can hook up to a modem or wireless router and make that drive accessible on your network, so you can back up to it from any computer, it also has redundancies built in so you can back up your data on a different partition of the Buffalo hard drive. These solutions cost anywhere from $160 to $500, depending on size, model and special offer.
A third way is to use a big sd card, they have 32gb sd cards now, sometimes for $50 or $60 on sale, they even have 128gb sd usb thumb drives but these are still in the 130 range. Price of solid state drives is coming down fast, saw a 64gb for $99, so I think in about a year you can start seeing large, dependable ssd drives for a reasonable amount of money.
Finally there is the subscription option of using online storage, for 10 or 20gb it may be a decent idea but will cost you $5 a month or thereabouts.
hth
-B
I've liked the rezults with the my book drives made by western digital. Agree with most others here. USB will do the trick from the sound of it or a large sd card.
The only issues I see when it comes to online backup are 3.
1. You better hope you have at least 500 kilobits per second or 64 kilobytes per second of upload to use if you plan to upload anything more than 1 gb of data.
2. What happens to your data if the site or servers that you're using for it go down for an extended period of time?
3. I'd advise you read the TOS of the backup site carefully, some sites keep your encryption key which they use when encrypting your uploads and use it only on the machine you used to do the initial upload.
As in, if you do an upload on another machine it will be sent in plaintext.
It's true. But I find, most if not all of the stuff I want to back up is pics, music, emails (which could be retrieved by a malicious third party from my mail server anyway) and such. Personal info, banking and such I do not back up, nor make available, online at all. I find people overly concerned with security and privacy sometimes. They are more than welcome to listen to my phone calls, as long as they're not to the bank, and they can look at my family pictures if they want to break into my online account.
But the other two points are very valid, and online back up is really slow, which is why I prefer the other methods I mentioned.
Wildebrew, you've interested me with this hard drive near the size of the booksense. Since, I'm very fimiliar with that size. Do you have a brand?
Hmmm, I hadn't thought much about a solid state drive or memory card. Would y'all say there is any difference as far as reliability? In these three choices, I mean?
I've done things like burn information to disk or saved it on various thumb drives, but this just isn't a central location, and I cannot update the cd's I've burned.
I suppose something like 32gb may do me. I haven't really made a stock pile of what I want saved.
Thanks for all this info, I appreciate it!
BTW, is it possible to use one drive for a windows and mac machine?
I've used the Western Digital MyPassport drive, 500gb, bought it for $130 but I think price has gone down a bit since.
Believe it is operable with Windows and Mac, the specs for the hard drive will tell you.
I've also used a Lacie drive which worked fine for me.
You can easily get 32 og 64gb thumb drives now for between 50 and 100 bucks, mostly from Kingston, buy.com or newegg.com are both good sources. As far as I know they also work just fine with either Windows or Mac OS.
the Solid State drives need installing and are not really portable. I guess they do not necessarily belong in this discussion but I just saw the ad for a 64 gig one for $99 this moring and remember last fall the 32gb one was around 200 cheapest I saw, so just pointing out we will probably have dependable ss drives for a very reasonable costin about a year.
Agreed, to answer your question Polka dots and Moonbeams, yes the drive will work with both machines. Unsure if mac can read ntfs by default. I know that most external drives are formatted as fat32, but not all.
yeah most external are fat 32 and there is an app for mac that should enable it to read ntfs drives and write to them. also if your router has a usb port on it you should be able to plug your hd inthere and have it available to the network. Brands don't really matter as about only 2 companies actually make HD and everyone else buys it and rebrands it. and most the the off brand externals have WD or other brand name drives inside them anyways you can find this buy reading the fine print or hoping the external casing.
Aside from size, 250gb 500gb and those ginormous tb models, is there much of a difference? No not really
What brand do you use? Western Digital mybook 1TB.
Do you like to have your own or do you share?you and your spouse. I like my own am not really the share type when it comes to techy stuff.
Lastly, how about using one hard drive for multiple machines, how does that work? Plug and play makes it so easy.
You guys have been so helpful. I think I'll go to my local Frys shop and both my spouse and I will pick out our own. Lol, if brand doesn't really matter, I'll go for size and color!
Last night, I started backing things up on some of my USB drives, but again, it is a matter of keeping track which drive has what. I love that synctoy though!
One other thing, is there a way to scan a file before it lands onto the USB drive or external hd? Our old desktop is either dying or possibly infected. It seems clean, every scan I run is coming up clean, but I'm just not sure. So I'd want to be certain the files were clean before loading them onto the external storage, right?
Avira Anti virus you can choose which folder or drive to scan, think to start scanning you have to use f6 (tricky, it doesn't say anywhere).
Also, have you run either super anti spyware or malware bytes anti malware on the desktop? A lot of anti virus software is not picking up the anyoing malware things you end up with from the internet. I find these two equally good at detecting and removing the software and loudly recommend them to anyone, can download them through e.g. www.filehippo.com under anti virus and malware removal, there is a link to the official web site.
Most viruses (not all, but the vast majority) infects your registry or copies itself into your system32 or systems directory, so if you are copying pics and emails it's less likely you will have infected files in there.
But be on the save side and check it.
Check prices on www.buy.com or www.newegg.com for hard drives before going to shop locally, these stores are always in the cheap area so you will get an idea of what you should be paying for a drive.
Wildebrew, thanks again. I've ran malware bite twice. The first time, it caught a crap load of infections. Twenty-three, I believe. After running that and deleting all that it found, I restarted the computer, ran ccleaner, and restarted it again. I dinged around on the web for a while, then ran malware bites again. It came up clean.
So, malware bites is coming up clean, and so far, our computer isn't spontaneously turning off, like it was. Shall I gather, our computer may be fine now?
Sorry, a little off topic, I know, but it all leads back to the desire to save information in case the computer is dying. Lol!
Ah. The nasties. Good advice you are getting here. One thing has not been said about swapping between mac and PC when you label the files give them some sort of note. Maybe if you say have pictures on the aMac label it whatever, then add Mac at the end same with the PC that way you'll not be trying to open files that are not compatible on the wrong machine? That was what I meant by messy. Smile.
Your machine is now working and clean. Smile, but back it up if you desire. Let us go shopping?
when it come to file types, it usually will be compareable either machine. it is the question either what software you have to open the file. for example, i know as a fact a word document .doc file can open in IWork, and an IWork file can safe as a .doc document and can be open in ms word. the same apply to other file such as .jpg, .jpeg, .mp3, etc etc. it is much depends on what software you run on either of the pc or mac machine.
to answer the main question of this topic, i don't think brand is the matter, its depends on how you use it. always remember to go for safe remove hardware option and remove any of your external drive from there. don't just plug out from the computer without doing so, it will shorter the external drive life, either its just an USB drive, or a harddrive.
when you talking about cost, it come to either you go for a USB harddrive who operates using computer Power, or you want a big 3.5 inch harddrive who run its own power. i guess, when Bru, mention about a size of a booksense, i guess, its 2.5 inch drive, who basicly runs on a USB cable, and using the power from the computer.
when come to either to share or not to share, i guess, it come to a question either you want the external drive as a back up for all the computer, who act as a back up server of somekind or just, a back up for your own computer.
i prefer to have my own backup drive, not because of any privacy reason, but, i feel i'm more comfortable to locate the files in the drive, and use it in the way i want.
Brand really does matter.
I have purchased some off brand externals before and their controler on the external case shorts out, leading those who may not know any better to think that the hard drive is dead and their data lost. In that case, you must remove the internal hard drive inside and plug it up to either another case or your computer and retrieve your data.
Think the brand was phantom
While it is true that companies merely purchase hard drives from other manufactures and simply slap their brand on to the outside of their case, the controler that sits between the hd and the external case matters a lot.
As a techy who keeps up with trends and tends to understand what will soon become the established norm, I recommend holding off on ESATA at the moment. This is due to SATAIII or properly known as SATA 6.0gb/s will soon make its introduction and become standard on future motherboards. Which means that the ESATA ports will also be SATA 6.0 as well.
In an earlier post I made a recommendation to someone who was looking for wireless cards to go for the N standard, predicting that it will become prevalent in systems, intel has done just that in netbooks, etc.
Also, USB 3 is coming, their are just ironing out the kinks so to speak.
To put things in perspective, usb 2 transfers at about 30 megabytes per second in real world testing, but usb 3 is said to rival SATA II in throughput.
I believe that usb 3 will be backwards compatible, as well as SATA 6.0.
So when choosing and external, just as yourself these simple questions and you will save yourself several inconveniences.
1. Do you want to be tethered to the wall?
2. How frequently are you going to move that external from one computer to another?
3. How reliable would you like it to be?
Answers:
If you don't enjoy having to keep plugging and unplugging the hard drive from the wall just to move it to the other room to grab a single file just to return and load it on to your primary computer, then go for the portable 2.5 externals.
I recommend buffalo technology. I have had several, and they have not given me any problems.
It costs just as much to buy a prebuilt external as it does to build it myself, so I no longer even bother.