Recommendations for external Hard Drives

[Elodan]

I've just had a major data loss on my computer. My CDs backups were woefully out of date (issue with the CD burner, now fixed).

Considering all the pictures and other such large amounts of data we were storing on my PC, I was thinking of getting a portable HD to use for backups. I would appreciate any recommendations.

If you have other suggestions for backup strategies, I'm all ears.

Thanks.

 

[Wonko the Sane]

I've had one of these for a few months now...it seems to be running just fine. Transfer speeds are really good - we watch movies and listen to music stored on it on other computers in the network without any issues.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I'd recommend a local backup, and an online service like Mozy or Jungledisk. They'll run automatically in the background so even if you forget to use the local backup, and it's offsite to protect against anything that might damage your computer and backup. (Like when my friend's plumbing leaked and fried his electronics.)

Personally, I use Jungledisk.

 

[Lazybones]

I've been using a 320gb MyBook for about a year now. It's very easy to use and I've never had a problem with it. I keep it in the closet and take it out for a backup every month or so. You can find them for about $100 now.

 

[jdrakeh]

Just went through kind of the same thing that you did. I bought a generic 2.5" HDD enclosure (with onboard media player, for the technophile in me) and a 80 GB Western Digital Scorpio HDD. The whole package cost me less than $100 with shipping and I'm very happy with it. Wish I would have had it before the EZ20 file loss, though

 

[Rackhir]

If you have the choice firewire is better for a directly connected HD than USB2 (lower processor utilization and overhead). eSATA (or external SATA) is on some of the higher end drives and gives you full speed as if it was an internal drive. But you will probably need a separate card to use an eSATA connection. If you are so inclined there are plenty of cases that you can put a HD you buy separately into (or swap in and out of). However most of the prepackaged external HDs come with backup software.

There's also a number of drives that are designed to be put on a network with an ethernet connection. They are slower, but can be used by more than one computer.

Here's an example.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136084

 

[azhrei_fje]

If you have the choice firewire is better for a directly connected HD than USB2 (lower processor utilization and overhead).

+1

I would also highly recommend using FW over USB, if the option is available. Few PCs will come with FW ports, however.

However most of the prepackaged external HDs come with backup software.

If you're considering software for backup, check out the pricing on Ghost 12 right now ... with rebate, it's free! So you'll pay shipping/tax/whatever, but the cost is $0. And it's a well-supported product with enterprise-level reliability. The next best package for all-in-one backup and system recovery would probably be DataPro (but my personal experience with them has not been good; YMMV).

Network Attached Storage, or NAS, drives have become quite popular, since a free operating system such as Linux or FreeBSD can be put on them by the manufacturer and there are no licensing fees. Of if you have a spare machine sitting around, load it up with some cheap disk drives (BB had 320GB drives for $39 on Black Friday!) and install one of the pre-packaged NAS systems, such as FreeNAS. The FreeNAS software provides file serving capability for SMB/CIFS (Windows), AppleTalk, NFS, and even AFS with the right configuration. You can hook printers to it and do printer sharing as well. There are even more advantages ... such as putting FreeNAS on a bootable CD, your configuration on a write-protected floppy, and then never having to worry about viruses or any kind of operating system corruption!

Check out http://distrowatch.com/ for a slew of free operating system downloads.

 

[Ranger REG]

I have a Seagate 180 GB, but that is filling up fast. The good thing about it is the power switch (had a WD 80 GB but I had to pull the power cable to turn it off). The bad thing that I later found out, I don't like the power switch in the back between the two cable connection (USB and power). One tap on the USB and my PC won't acknowledge it.

I'm really starting to hate USB. Easier to jiggle, easier to disconnect.

 

[CrusaderX]

I love the Seagate FreeAgent drive that I use at work. Very easy to use, plus it looks very cool.

 

[ssampier]

If you have multiple machines, a NAS is probably your best bet.

For single use, most of the external USB drives are pretty much the same (the difference being the included software). Lastly, I did not care for the MyBook MioNet software at all. Without it, I could never get the Windows file sharing to work right.