Any hard drive preferences out there?

[progressoid]

I'm looking for back up storage. I just lost a 500gb Seagate :puke:
Luckily most of it was backed up on DVDs but it's a pain to rebuild all that info.

So I've been considering this Western Digital 2T mirror thing.
http://store.westerndigital.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/categoryID.13093500/subCategory.13457600/parid.13092300/catid.13092800

Technically its only one terabyte of storage but I like the mirrored idea. Newegg has it for 229.00. Whadya think?


Eventually I'll have to get something even more substantial since I have hundreds of CDs and DVDs that will need to be backed up as well. But for now this will at least give me some sense of security if my computer crashes (again).

[hobbit709]

1. Pick a brand, any brand

and someone here will either swear by or swear at it. I buy about 2 dozen drives a year for either builds or repairs and have had about the same luck on any of them. The most of any brand I've had fail were Hitachi(3), the least Samsung(0)-but I've only bought 2 Samsungs. Maxtor, WD or Seagate had 2 each fail in the past 4 years.

[progressoid]

2. Yeah, I just talked to someone who rec'd Seagate.

That's the thing I just threw away.

I'm also looking into online storage like http://www.carbonite.com/ maybe.

[hobbit709]

3. The problem with online storage is

A. What if you can't get online for some reason
B. Would you really trust outsiders with your data.

An external drive is the best way for keeping backup. I've got 50Gb of mp3 files alone and they're backed up on an external 100Gb drive sitting in my closet and secondary backup of a dozen DVD-R as data disks.
Everything real important to me is backed up on at least two other sources than my main drive.

[progressoid]

4. The bigger problem for me is thinning the herd and organization.

I have over 500 CDs and over a hundred DVDs with photos. When a client calls looking for some old thing,I have to sort through my very haphazard filing system. So in the coming weeks I'll be sorting and filing and renaming and cataloging and probably drinking a lot.

I want to create a more searchable system. I'm going to test ACDSee next week.
http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.78701700

[RoyGBiv]

5. Online storage ...

If this is one of your goals, the online storage solutions are definitely not the way to go. You could set up better organization with this, but not any better than with a localized system. Plus you'd have to deal with the added overheard of having to download everything you want to use, and as was mentioned, what if you can't get online for some reason?

The Seagate vs. Western Digital argument is not something I wish to get into. It pretty much boils down to personal preference and experience, I think. I, for example, had nightmarish problems with Seagate when the standard size of a hard drive was around 40 MB (yes, megabytes) and swore I'd never use them again. I now have half a dozen of them, two of which are bolted into myself for constant use, the others swapped out as needed. I also have WD drives and a Samsung drive I use frequently. They've all served me well.

That said, some of the very large Seagates that have come out recently have some mechanical problems, according to reports, the 1.5 TB in particular. Based on what I'm reading online, I suspect this is due to a bad lot of them and not the drive itself. Hopefully they'll get it worked out.

Anyway ... for your situation, I'd suggest one of the external Western Digitals with as large a capacity as you can afford. NewEgg has more than one of them.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

6. Samsung.

They are M1A2 tanks of HDDs. Never had one fail and they are all I install. 500GB OEM Samsungs are $59.00 at NewEgg. I have installed dozens, in both new builds and replacements.

Seagate: Fast but fragile.

WD: have had many fail and have never seen the performance numbers they tout.

With HDDs, I consider reliability the single most important delimiter. Which is why I so agressively tout Samsung.