Drowning in data; what to do with it all?

Hokkay, So.

I think i'm at my whits end with our current external drives; they are western digital "my books" and are 1TB each; i have had nothing but problems with the one that i use; my wife doesn't have any real complains with her's, basically mine freezes randomly, and has to be restarted or allowed to sit for an hour or more. It supports firewire, usb 2, and eSata.

it is ungodly slow (i don't know if it just got that way, or always was) with firewire and usb 2.0 (firewire performs a little better, but i think its only supporting firewire 400. and i have not been able for the life of me to get the eSata to work (rated at 3gbits/sec). The motherboard recognizes the drive on eSata, but i can't get windows to acknowledge its existence; either in explorer or in disk manager.

So; i have been trying to get the 980gb of data (files, images, crap, more crap, and probably 2-3 duplicates of each unique file) off the drive, so i can return the pile to Costco; I would like to switch to a new platform all together, but their current offerings are all seagate externals. I have had problems with seagate large format drives in the past (internal) so I'm not sure what to do; or, for that matter what the best way to comb through the mountains of data i have that most of which is useless.

accessing external drives is painfully slow regardless of what method you use (and the new seagates only support usb 2.0) so ... what should i do? i'm planning on driving into town and picking up 3 of their 1.5TB drives, and getting rid of this junk...

/rant

anyone else go through this yet?

I keep everything I am using on my computers hard drive and thus it is faster. The external are simply there as backup. One backup (seagate) is setup to backup my computer automatically each night. Another I backup myself weekly and in a safe. That is for all my current files.

My archived files are kept on duplicate externals in the safe. I only keep .jpegs for archived files and not at full quality.

Is it possible you have the drive too full? I never use more than 80% of the drives space. I only had one drive that I thought was slow compared to my other drives (it was an internal) but I looked at the specs later and realized it WAS slower... Otherwise never had an issue with drives of any type of interface.

Nup. Sorry. Have had 3 WDs. My Book and two Elements. None has ever missed a beat. Only USB 2 and FW400, and a bit slower than internal WD but OK. Am.

I have a iomega prestige 1.5TB that works pretty well; I can move about 32 megabytes/second with it -- maybe a change in brands? Although I'm not sure who the manufacturer of the hard disk itself is.

I work off my local hard drive, and copy out to an external drive as primary backup. Unit is an Astone (possibly Australian brand?) eSATA-connected with a WD drive in it, and it's never missed a beat.

Maybe you just got a bad unit?

dwarfcow wrote in post #10408810
Hokkay, So.

I think i'm at my whits end with our current external drives; they are western digital "my books" and are 1TB each; i have had nothing but problems with the one that i use; my wife doesn't have any real complains with her's, basically mine freezes randomly, and has to be restarted or allowed to sit for an hour or more. It supports firewire, usb 2, and eSata.

it is ungodly slow (i don't know if it just got that way, or always was) with firewire and usb 2.0 (firewire performs a little better, but i think its only supporting firewire 400. and i have not been able for the life of me to get the eSata to work (rated at 3gbits/sec). The motherboard recognizes the drive on eSata, but i can't get windows to acknowledge its existence; either in explorer or in disk manager.

So; i have been trying to get the 980gb of data (files, images, crap, more crap, and probably 2-3 duplicates of each unique file) off the drive, so i can return the pile to Costco; I would like to switch to a new platform all together, but their current offerings are all seagate externals. I have had problems with seagate large format drives in the past (internal) so I'm not sure what to do; or, for that matter what the best way to comb through the mountains of data i have that most of which is useless.

accessing external drives is painfully slow regardless of what method you use (and the new seagates only support usb 2.0) so ... what should i do? i'm planning on driving into town and picking up 3 of their 1.5TB drives, and getting rid of this junk...

/rant

anyone else go through this yet?

Wait, I think I see your problem!

well, that and you need a few of these mounted internally;

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Some external drives will power down when not used hence the apparent "freezing". It is a power saving feature. If you find the power saving feature annoying, you might want to try getting a enclosure and just buying internal drives.

Have you considered getting a 'toaster" and using internal drives. http://www.tigerdirect​.com …tegory_slc.asp?​CatId=2785

Wayne

I use the Seagate Xtreme Freeagent drives and Ive never had a problem. Have you tried defragmenting the drives?

torvaterra wrote in post #10410966
I use the Seagate Xtreme Freeagent drives and Ive never had a problem. Have you tried defragmenting the drives?

they are indexed ntfs, defragmenting isn't possible. i called WD, and they said to just return the drives; get new ones...

i just picked up 3 of the seagate free agent 1.5TB's now i'm just gonna have to come up with a logical system for storing and archiving..

just getting started:

Lol, saves on the energy bills I am sure =)

themadman wrote in post #10411123
Lol, saves on the energy bills I am sure =)

I'm guessing the heat bills in the winter more than make up for it!


As for the initial question, you may consider a shared/networking RAID system. There are some very simple and powerful ones available. At work we use the IOmega Storcenter ix2-400 units for some smaller workgroups and they are great. Easy to setup, fast, redundant, 3 year warranty, built in networking and file sharing, includes backup software, etc.

Here's the link to the product:
http://go.iomega.com …ve-ix4-200d/?partner=4760


There are many similar setups, but I can vouch for the Iomega.

themadman wrote in post #10411123
Lol, saves on the energy bills I am sure =)

psh, only 2 of the 5 in the picture are on....

sadly, in the processes of "gittn r done" the damn seagate is doing the same stupid antics.. there is obviously something wrong with the computer's OS. but i'm running the same OS as the wife on her laptop, and she has no problems... and it happens on firewire AND usb; so i can rule out simply usb drivers etc...

On a side note, if i unplug any external, there is a good chance when i plug it back in, it wont populate in my computer until i re-assign a drive letter to it in disk manager (admin tools) which is annoying as all getup.

I'm going to chime in with a vote that you look into some kind of network based storage.

if your brave, you can build it yourself, but I'm not familiar with your level of expertise.

for under $1000 you should be able to put something together with a few T of storage, in a RAID configuration (faster, because you have multiple read/write heads on the virtual 'drive', bigger storage space, and usually can be configd so that if a drive fails, you lose no data), a gig-e interface to your network, and no more messing about with plugs again.

of course, this type of system will give you other issues.

is there any particular reason your going with externals in the first place?