External Hard Drive - Striper Talk Striped Bass Fishing, Surfcasting, Boating

EricW · 03-20-2006, 07:35 PM

You should probably be ok as long as you stick to one of the big guys, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital. There are a bunch of external hd's out there that come complete with relatively good backup software and one of them has a one touch button that will do the backup for you, after you have to set it up probably. You can do it yourself sometimes cheaper if you get a drive on sale (like 49.99 for a 100-120 etc) at compusa or best buy and then buy your own enclosure. Either way, get one that has a fan. THese new hd's run teribbly hot and overheating is a big cause of failure. I have a 250 gig and it gets so hot it almost burns you. I leave the cover off of my enclosure and don't run it all the time.
I've been in IT for about 15 years now, and I have seen lots of different manufacturers in the desktops, and servers I have worked on and for me anyway, they all seem to fail at the same rate. Not many really, but you get a handful of each brand over time. None has really stood out above the others for me anyway on failure rate. Newer drives also have this SMART technology where the computer will tell you the drive is starting to fail. That has saved us a bunch of times. It sometimes gives you the ability to get everything off before you replace it. I don't know if an external setup will give you that though, since it would be usb and on bootup may not be noticed by the system.
For backup I use nero backitup, (got it free with my dvd burner but you can buy it too) and it does a great job of doing full,incremental etc. It has a scheduler and just does it's thing. Some hd's come with backup software free, so it may be good to compare who includes what.

Good luck,

Eric

jugstah · 03-21-2006, 11:31 AM

Eric is correct, none of the manufacturers seem to stand out when it comes to longevity of their hard drives. Most of them seem to fail at some point. However, sometimes you get lucky, and have a hard drive that gives you a really long life.

As it is, it's important to keep it cool. Heat seems to shorten the lifespan of a hard drive. And External hard drives are probably terrible at this part, as a lot of them really get hot.

I run a file-server, put my hard drives in there, and put it in a out-of-the-way spot. And use RAID so if one drive fails, I can just replace it and not worry about losing all of my data.

JohnR · 03-21-2006, 11:44 AM

Ahhh - the memories...

Quantum Fireballs
IBM DeathStars, err, I mean DeskStars (Click of Death)
Early 7200RPM Seagate Barracudas ATA (another drive that could cook eggs)
I remember a few 10K Seagate Cheetahs giving up the ghost (thank god for RAID5)
Fujitsu SCSI drives...

ThrowingTimber · 03-21-2006, 06:01 PM

10K Seagate Cheetahs

ahhh my old gaming rig!! Thing sounded like a harrier!!

jugstah · 03-21-2006, 10:42 PM

Heh, Deathstars. I hated those.

Had too many of 'em go bad...

EricW · 03-21-2006, 10:51 PM

On the topic of raid, anybody else experience one of Dell's problem Perc3 Controllers of a couple years ago? I had one. Without the right firmware it would take out multiple drives on a raid unit. One of my servers has 14 73gig scsi drives and it took out at least 4 of them. A huge pain in the .....Was the only time I have seen dell willing to send a tech to you whenever you wanted 7*24*365 to fix the problem. Thank goodness I didn't have anything critical on there. Since 2 or more drives failed per container, raid couln't help. They actually called me, but one of mine already bit the dust.

Eric

Jonny5-22796 · 03-22-2006, 07:30 PM

Western Digital Over Seagate... Always...

If cost is a factor Hitachi makes a great low cost HD that can be outfitted externally.

JohnR · 03-22-2006, 09:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EricW

On the topic of raid, anybody else experience one of Dell's problem Perc3 Controllers of a couple years ago? I had one. Without the right firmware it would take out multiple drives on a raid unit. One of my servers has 14 73gig scsi drives and it took out at least 4 of them. A huge pain in the .....Was the only time I have seen dell willing to send a tech to you whenever you wanted 7*24*365 to fix the problem. Thank goodness I didn't have anything critical on there. Since 2 or more drives failed per container, raid couln't help. They actually called me, but one of mine already bit the dust.

Eric

I had a few flukey things happen on a PE4200 & PE4300 with the Perc/3 - did not realize it was that wide spread... I had a 10K Quantaum Atlas dead out of the box on a PE2300 back 6+ years ago...