Be Excellent To Each Other

My 250 GB are just not enough. I want to buy an extra 1TB for my computer but i have some doubts. I always used Seagate and never had any problems with it, but it seems the early 1TB Seagate models had some problems and Western Digital are more popular these days. Any experiences to share?

Besides that, i never had 2 internal HD's. Do i just plug in the thing, or do i also have to mess up in the BIOS or in the windows control panel?

Google's massive study of hard drives concluded there is no make or model that is statistcally more or less reliable, so just buy on capacity and specification.

Really? So there's no difference between having Seagate/WD or *insert random junk here*?

I would always go for branded..

Whatabout the eco drives?

You may well need to mess about with Master | Slave jumpers, and you might need a new cable.
But it's simple stuff. Just make sure the new HDD has the 'slave' jumper set.

What? I doubt RuySan has PATA.

Also, I am 180 degrees wrong on the Google thing. The actual paper says there are makes and models that are less reliable, but Google cannot release that data, presumably because of some confidentiality agreement with their suppliers

Still, anecdotal "oh, this drive failed for me" isn't much use. I still say buy whatever brand makes sense for your budget and size requirements, and make sure you are always backed up. Treat all drives like they will fail.

Good Idead Doc.. I might get another drive with the one in my new box.

As my MB supports raid 0 and raid 1 (what ever that means)

care to detail? i know shit about that. I though i only needed to connect one sata cable and another power cable and voila! Another extra drive

RAID0 is striping, two drives with each file striped across them. Twice as fast, twice as much chance of data loss. RAID1 is mirroring, all your data on both disks. Slow to write but fast to read data, you can lose either disk without losing any data.

Most of my important data lives in my two-drive NAS, which isn't RAIDed but has a backup script copying data from one drive to the other. My PC has a four-drive RAID0+1, which is both striped (for speed) and mirrored (for reliability).

SATA is fine. Jumpers are for more old-fashioned drives.

Ah... I will be setting a server up to do backups.

Is it worth raid1 my pc?

Yes.

right, this article

http://www.wikihow.com/Add-an-Extra-Hard-Drive

mentions that i don't need to mess with the jumpers if it's a SATA drive. So i guess it pretty straightforward

Yes. For SATA, you just plug in the power and data leads.

I will get another drive when I pick my PC up then..

Sata you just plug in.. Well I did.. IDE or PATA was the jumper thing

RAID0+1 ftw, definitely (if you can afford four drives).

Someone explain to Kovacs how RAID isn't a backup, though.

Yeah, that's right. I mentioned it in case you didn't have SATA drives.

I have never used Raid before... I can't afford 4 drives at the moment.

I do intend to back up to an other machine/dvd etc

If you can afford two, then go for RAID 1 (as long as it's just for storage, would slow down apps a bit).

Interesting fact. I have never had a personal hard drive fail. See failed drives all the time at work, but never mine. I have a stack of old drives that have become obsolete. I think the oldest one I have is probably a 4gb. I reckon it's still got windows 95 installed on it.

It is not just for storage, it is my main PC..

Not sure if my old PC can do raid but it can have 2 Sata drive...

I feel a crash corse in PC knowledge coming up..

I only use WDs because I had a Deathstar that died (which puts Hitachi out),a load of Maxtors that died (which puts Maxtor and Seagate out), and Fujitsu and Samsung were noisy, slow fuckers last time I had any experience with them (thankfully not on my own machines).

Meanwhile, WDs are priced competitively, fast, cool, quiet and thus far reliable (2 500giggers in my NAS, and a 7200rpm one as an upgrade to my work laptop. It's unbelievably fast in comparison, being higher density and 16MB cache as well as higher spindle speed.

Right - RAID isn't a backup, because if you delete a file on one of your mirrored volumes, it will immediately proceed to wipe that file from the other half of the pair, which no option for recovery.

RAID is for:

1) Protecting against total failure of a disk
2) Tailoring read/write performance for specific usages.

I have 6Tb of Samsung disks in this house right now, of varying vintages, and they are all great. Quiet too.

Samsung or WD, then.

6TB?! Do you live in a data centre or something?

I'd beat that, but I expect Chinny to smack me down so I won't bother.

It is a touch excessive, granted.

My NAS has 2x1.5Tb, which were going to be in RAID1 until I changed my mind about that and made one drive rsync to the other instead because RAID is not a backup. My PC has four 500Gb drives in a RAID0+1. It was all rather accidental. The NAS needed upgrading from its RAID-1 2x500Gb drives, I had a third 500Gb drive in an old machine, and my new PC had a fourth. So, I bought the two 1.5Tb drives, and ended up with four entirely spare drives for the RAID0+1 array.

Total usable space is "only" 2.5Tb, and it's really quite empty so far (although MyFinger has a 1Tb drive full of warezed HD movies, so that won't last long).

http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/mass ... ing-thing/



?? (I can't access that pdf though)

Aye, read down to my next post

Oops.
Still, I kind of agree, but I always prefer a brand I've actually heard of.

Also: In the event of something going wrong with your PSU, it's quite capable of knocking out every hard drive attached*, so backup should have some kind of separation from the computer that needs backing up.

* - Grr.

And also: fire, flood, burglary means that any backup in your house isn't really a backup either.

:I wish I could back up my Xbox 360 HDD.

Nuclear strike also means that any backup within a 50 mile radius isn't really a backup, either.

See also, global warming and extra-system meteor strikes. I'm planning a split site Jupiter/Neptune offsite backup solution, myself.

One of my bugbears about the 360 is how much better the PS3 works. It can do a one-click backup to any USB memory device.

I reckon you could do a backup of the 360 drive with a raw sector copy. Whether you could put that back onto a replacement drive, who knows.

I want to know why no-one's put together an SATA-over-ethernet adaptor/terminator for it yet. GigE should be fast enough.

Ah man - I wasn't going to post the same thing because it would be tempting fate. Then just this evening I got my foot caught in a USB wire as I got up and pulled an external HDD to the floor and now it won't wind up.
All my Wii games

There seems to be a lack of sympathy. > 30 Wii games, people!

Yep. I trashed my Seagate external by accidently pulling the power.

Think I'm going to do an HD upgrade on the edit suite. Possibly get 2 of whatever the biggest is these days and RAID them.

Careless home taping costs lives! You dirty pirate.

How callous of us all. :(

Sorry to hear you own a Wii, Grim....

I have a pair of these Seagate drives. Quiet and AWESOME.

Just ordered 2 of these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149459

Heat is what kills hard drives and little else (well apart from physical abuse).

Just make sure they're well cooled and they'll last

I've got a 250 and 500gb barracuda. I'd never used Seagate before on account of them being incredibly loud (the ones where they came with a rubber X thing on them in a pathetic attempt to quieten them). Because of that noise I always used the slim maxtors as they were whisper quiet, but I gotta say Seagate have really come along since then.

On a similar note, anyone have a recommendation for a decent cheapish external 200-500gb HD, just so i can back up i-tunes/other music files. I used to use buffalo ministations but they seem to have gone up in price, at Amazon at least.

I have probably asked this before...

but what backup software do you recommend, that is free/cheap...

I will be backing up across a network...

Cheers

Kov

xcopy.exe, personally.

Does this do an auto backup?

The wife is paranoid about losing baby photos

It does if you schedule it. It's just the built-in command line XP copy utility. Basically it's Robocopy.