External hard drive recommendation please?

[snyderman]

Ok, home computer hard drive filling up quickly. Should probably either, a) delete a bunch of stuff; b) buy an external hard drive.

They seem to be increasing in storage capacity and dropping in price. What size and cost should I focus my search?

Thanks in advance.

dave

[tvphotog]

Depends on the size of the files you shoot. I shoot thousands of 21MB pictures on a trip, and have bought a Western Digital 2TB My Book Mirror Edition USB 2.0 External Hard Drive. It's about the size of three paperback books, and can be configured to RAID 1 or RAID 0, so that you can use one 1 TB drive to store and the other to be a mirror backup of it, or to use the full 2TB's for storage. It comes as a 1 TB drive as well for about $110.

[iqbal624]

I just bought two drives (both from Costco)
Western Digital Portable 320GB for $70 (coupon now) and Seagate 1.5 TB for $140...

[Blue S2]

I use these:
http://www.ezq.com/product/offproductspec.php?id=6

EZQuest makes some pretty solid drives IMO. Esata ports are nice too when dealing with huge amounts of data. Its not listed in the box contents, but the last one I ordered from them a week ago (I have LOTS of drives...) even came with an eSata PCI card. Very nice!

[ed rader]

Ok, home computer hard drive filling up quickly. Should probably either, a) delete a bunch of stuff; b) buy an external hard drive.

They seem to be increasing in storage capacity and dropping in price. What size and cost should I focus my search?

Thanks in advance.

dave

i've so far used three seagates.....350 gb, 500 gb, 700 gb. soon i'll be buying two more seagate freeagents probably 1 TB each.

ed rader

[EloquentPixels]

I have a WD passport since I can easily carry it around with my laptop. If you're not going to move it around you could get the 3.5" ones which are cheaper.

I do keep copies of everything on a NAS too, but the access to it is getting slower and slower with ever increasing file sizes.

[dave kadolph]

I use an HP Mediasmart home server.

4 hot swappable hard drives and automatic backup is hard to beat IMHO.

[Fastfwd13]

If you want to carry one around and plug it quick into the laptop get a portable external drive. Those are limited to 500GB currently but they only require a usb cable to the computer.

Other external drives can reach double that or more but require 120v power

If you want speed get a NAS that can connect with gigabit ethernet instead of usb.

[tmwag]

OK, like buy an external hard drive..WT..1600 POSTS!:rolleyes:

[SteveJa]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8990443&type=product&id=1218007083869


this is what I got, works great. use it as an external drive, but use internal drives with it. we all know that internal drives are cheaper. also if you have an external ESATA hookup, this is the way to go. up to 3Gbps... smokes usb2.

[livinglight]

I've built up a stack of 5 of the Western Digital 1 TB drives. I just get the stock model that's available everywhere, and it's generally close to the same price of buying a bare drive only.

If you grab a small USB hub when the time comes, you can stack up a whole lot of drives but still make it look nice and tidy.

But to actually answer the question; anything from a reputable manufacturer should do the trick.

[dovaka]

this is a bit more then a usb drive but its what i store all of my data in
did i mention i own a offsite data storage company and ive got hardware laying around like you couldnt believe
http://dovaka.net/hosted/cluster.jpg

[ed rader]

this is a bit more then a usb drive but its what i store all of my data in
did i mention i own a offsite data storage company and ive got hardware laying around like you couldnt believe



your name isn't "slug" by any chance.....is it ;)?

ed rader

[hollis_f]

I use a docking station that accepts both 2.5" and 3.5" internal drives. It means I can easily swap them over. There's a 1.5TB 3.5" drive in there most of the time, but it regularly gets swapped over when I backup my pictures to a separate drive and when I do a full backup to my off-site drive.

Do get one with an eSATA interface as well as USB. If you don't have eSATA on your PC now you will in the future.

[dovaka]

I use a docking station that accepts both 2.5" and 3.5" internal drives. It means I can easily swap them over. There's a 1.5TB 3.5" drive in there most of the time, but it regularly gets swapped over when I backup my pictures to a separate drive and when I do a full backup to my off-site drive.

Do get one with an eSATA interface as well as USB. If you don't have eSATA on your PC now you will in the future.

esata also handles large quantity small file transactions much better then usb does
youll be a lot happier when your moving around 100 of gigs of pictures

[Seanzky]

I use a docking station that accepts both 2.5" and 3.5" internal drives. It means I can easily swap them over. There's a 1.5TB 3.5" drive in there most of the time, but it regularly gets swapped over when I backup my pictures to a separate drive and when I do a full backup to my off-site drive.

Do get one with an eSATA interface as well as USB. If you don't have eSATA on your PC now you will in the future.

This is what I also use. The brand I have is Azio. Once in a while you find good deals on hard drives and this dock makes it easier to swap them than buying an enclosed case for each hard drive. I got a good deal once from Staples for a Western Digital (Green) 1TB 7200 RPM MyBook external HD for $99. I haven't seen it for that price since but you know how quickly HD prices drop.

I recommend checking buy.com, newegg.com or just checking nextag.com for the lowest prices of any product you like.

[MT Stringer]

I bought a Vantec NexStar Hard Drive Dock (Model NST-D100SU). It is very similar to the one previously mentioned. I'm using it right now to copy my sports photos on to a new 1TB Segate hard drive. So far, it is working great. It should be a snap to put in a new drive and backup my current 300GB drive and then switch them out.

I might mention that I don't think it is "Hot Swappable" because the instructions say to turn off the power before ejecting the drive. That's no biggie to me. Sounds simple enough. This model comes with the eSATA cable so it was a simple matter for me to just plug it into the back of my PC (recent motherboard upgrade has the connector on the back plate). It also comes with a bracket so you can hook up to an internal SATA connection, or use the supplied USB cable.

This unit was $39.95 at Fry's Electronics. I bought it yesterday along with a 1TB Segate HDD ($79) on sale and overnight have copied over 400GB of sports pics to it.

Here is a link (http://www.virtual-hideout.net/reviews/Vantec_NexStar_HDD_Dock/index.shtml) to a review that explains everything in detail.

I sure wish I had one of these years ago instead of having a cable run out the back of the PC so I could work on hard drives. :-)

Hope this helps.
Mike

[cohenfive]

i have a western digital 2x1 tb drive system. has 2 identical 1tb drives that automatically back up your data as you add or change files, then mirrors them so if one of the backup drives fails, you still have the other.

[Fastfwd13]

i have a western digital 2x1 tb drive system. has 2 identical 1tb drives that automatically back up your data as you add or change files, then mirrors them so if one of the backup drives fails, you still have the other.

And you have another copy somewhere? raid-1(mirror) is not a backup. It is redundancy.. it will make redundant anything you do, including dropping a complete folder by mistake!

[cohenfive]

i have a copy on my pc hd, plus the raid-1 backups. if the house goes up in smoke that's a problem, otherwise it mirrors the folders i have on my hd that i want backed up. the best backup is offsite, but i haven't done that yet.

[gjman]

You don't need to buy fancy brand name eSATA HDD docks. The generic versions work pretty well and in some cases have more features like card readers.

Here is the link to the basic doc which should be $20 after MIR (it was $10 after MIR about two weeks ago)

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10010344&prodlist=celebros

Also there is a software called HotSwap! that allows to hot swap eSATA.
http://mysite.verizon.net/kaakoon/hotswap/index_enu.htm

Finally, you need either connect USB or eSATA, if you connect both (especially if you have one with a card reader) then even if you "remove" the device as a SATA it might still be recognized as USB and that will significantly slow down its operations.

Here is my HD Tune Pro results for 1TB docked over eSATA:

eSATA drives give me:

HD Tune Pro: ST31000528AS Benchmark

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 66.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 116.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 100.5 MB/sec
Access Time : 14.9 ms
Burst Rate : 108.2 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 5.4%

[JackLiu]

For the past year I have been storing my images on 1.0TB external hard drives. As they fill up I just get another one. Right now they are fairly inexpensive. Picked one up on Sat., 3 Oct., at Fry's Electronics for $86.00 - SimpleTech 1.0TB USB External reDrive.

[sdsviet]

do all of u guys plan on using a drobo for ur storage? i know its a little pricey but the convenience of a their raid is worth the money IMO. of course i'll be backing up onto DVDs to use for off site stuff.