External Hard Drives

jeepinmatt

jeepinmatt

#1 WEBWHEELER
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Mar 24, 2005
Location
Stanley, NC
Wifey is wanting to get one to store pictures on. We have a 250GB from about 6 years ago that is still working fine, but its about full. Whats the conventional wisdom these days?
 
Are you looking for something that will live next to your desktop, or something that is portable, or even a wireless hard-drive? Also how much are you looking to spend, and how long did it take to fill up the first 250GB?
 
Portable is not important, don't care about wireless, just need the backup capability. First 250 gig took a couple years to fill up, but that was back when cellphone cameras were a joke and digital camera pics were like 2MB each. Now wife has a digital SLR and we have a new baby, so I guess a terabyte is a minimum start. Price is relative to what I'm getting, but I'd say $100 or less. I can do the research and find the best deal, but I didn't know what the differences were these days. Last time I looked there were full size drives, laptop size drives, and $olid $tate drive$.
 
Are you going to be sad Is your wife going to be angry if the hard drive fails and the photos are lost forever?

Make three copies of anything that you never want to lose. Store them in geographically separate locations. This is as easy as buying a couple of external drives, backing up all your stuff to them, then putting one in your desk drawer at work and one in your wife's desk drawer at work. Encrypt them if you're concerned about that sort of thing. Refresh the backups at regular intervals.

The drives themselves are commodity items at this point. Wait until somebody is running a stupid sale and buy. Stick to WD and Seagate. The 2.5" format drives can get their power via the USB cable, making them very portable. 1-2TB for family photos and sensitive documents is probably plenty, but pay attention to the price/performance breakover.
 
X2.

Trouble with digital cameras is we don't have to count pics so we take hundreds of pics, and save em all and sort em later! LOL! I know I have a 2-3 TB of external hardrives that I keep copies of everything.

Also external HDs dont take the wear and tear of the HD with the operating system installed on it. So they remain more reliable as well!
 
We got one networked. Pretty nice. Just shows up like a regular drive on all computers connected to the network. Seems to work well.
 
McCracken said:
Is this one worth it?
http://www.walmart.com/ip/WD-My-Book-4TB-USB-3.0-External-Hard-Drive/29016524

View attachment 187559
Click to expand...

<shrug>

Sure? But reviews are pretty terrible:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ..._re=WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN-_-22-236-626-_-Product

Based on the pricing, I'm betting it's a "green" drive inside the box. I've never had any luck with those. First one died in warranty. Replacement died outside of warranty. I vowed never to buy another. The 4TB Western Digital Black is $220 for a bare drive.
 
So the wife has a MacBook with Thunderbolt but USB 2.0. I have a PC with USB 3.0. Not many options that do both. Im looking at this LaCie 2TB which has both for $160:
https://www.lacie.com/US/products/product.htm?id=10629
I could care less about the rugged part, but I know if it's slow, neither of us will use it, so there's a value to the dual connectivity. Any other options out there in the 2tb range for less money?
 
Easy with the Time capsule, both myself and my Dad have had them fail, just outside of one year, these were the OLD style flat body like the Mini. The newer ones may be better now with SSD but I haven't seen anything conferming.
Dad's TC died by way of power supply failure, was eventually able to disassemble and retrieve the HD to pull backups onto a new HD, was a trying procedure as the TC seems be be "sealed" with some pretty gooey adhesive making getting to the HD kinda tough.
Mine failed intermitently with the Wifi, then the HD finally just ground to a halt ( literally made noise for a few days before it croaked ).

The newer tower style may be better, though I've got a newer AirPort Extreme Tower wifi router that seems to be flakey at times, might be an issue with the age of the iPad that seems to have most of the issues, or the distance from router and walls between, though I never had the issues when it (router)was new out of the box.

YMMV
 
Who cares if it dies? That's the point -- it's a duplicate of whatever you have saved elsewhere. No reason to need to pull the HDs.

I'm a huge fan of our Synology. You could do one of these with a red hard drive and have a more robust system for even money with the Apple stuff.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108181
 
I run a synology DS213J and it is great (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108139) running 2 drives in raid 1 with Western Digital Red Drives. Only downside is that putting a 200 gig itunes library on it doesn't stream to the computer as smooth as I wanted it to. For everything else it works great. Maybe more than you want to spend though, but its nice that any computer on the network can access it, and also I can access all of it remotely.
 
Going to bump this back up. Wondering if there's anything that has changed over the past ~4 years w/ how fast tech changes.

So, I'm leaving my job and I've got a shit ton of pictures on my laptop (saved over the years from the daily pictures daycare sends out via email). I've got a Seagate 2TB external HD now that I've had for probably ~7 years, but I plugged it into my laptop to start transferring shit over and I guess it wouldn't recognize the drive b/c nothing would come up. IT is definitely not my strong suit so I reach out to the on-site support IT guy at work and he said he'd take a look. Well, I take it over there and he goes to check the connections and the f'n twat waffle shoves the damn USB jack through and breaks it off (to which he then stated "well, there's your problem right there"). He then proceeded to take the whole drive apart and see if he could fix it and get it to come up on my machine but that's a negative ghost rider!

Long story short, I'm guessing I'm going to need to get another drive. The drive will come on when it's powered up (it has a power supply and USB power cord that plug into the back). He suggested just go to Best Buy and they should be able to transfer over and I can buy a new one there. Just looking for advice on what to do (i.e., go to Best Buy or...) and what to buy (e.g., another Seagate, WD, etc. and how big...is 2TB still sufficient today?). Also, sounds like I should probably buy 2, maybe 3, and save it all on each. For reference, I'm basically storing pictures/videos of the kids from over the years and a few other random Excel, Word, PDF type files. Not storing any music or movies so I wouldn't think anything too large (but again...I'm certainly no IT guru).

Below is a picture of what I have now (hopefully this gives a bit more info of what I'm working with). First pic is of the HD label inside the casing and second is the power and USB port that broke off (power port is black piece at bottom right and I'm holding USB directly below where it should be on the circuit board).

20190124_114209.jpg


20190124_114331 (2).jpg


Edit: IT guy suggested I get one of these and said it's the only way to get my stored files off my old hard drive and on to a new one.

https://www.amazon.com/SISUN-Dockin...ocphy=9009970&hvtargid=pla-568819850766&psc=1
 
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rcalexander105 said:
IT guy suggested I get one of these and said it's the only way to get my stored files off my old hard drive and on to a new one.
Click to expand...

That'll work, but if you have a regular desktop computer, you can pop the lid and plug that drive into a spare SATA port.

For deep storage, I'd just buy a regular spinning platter drive. You're looking at $80 for a 4TB external or $80 for a 500GB internal SSD. Unless you'r using an external SATA port on the computer to connect the drive, you won't see a speed difference. USB isn't fast enough for the speeds that SSD is capable of.

Edit: just noticed that the photo says it's a Seagate Green drive. Given that it's 7yrs old, I would spend as little money as possible trying to recover whatever information is on it.
 
rcalexander105 said:
Going to bump this back up. Wondering if there's anything that has changed over the past ~4 years w/ how fast tech changes.

So, I'm leaving my job and I've got a shit ton of pictures on my laptop (saved over the years from the daily pictures daycare sends out via email). I've got a Seagate 2TB external HD now that I've had for probably ~7 years, but I plugged it into my laptop to start transferring shit over and I guess it wouldn't recognize the drive b/c nothing would come up. IT is definitely not my strong suit so I reach out to the on-site support IT guy at work and he said he'd take a look. Well, I take it over there and he goes to check the connections and the f'n twat waffle shoves the damn USB jack through and breaks it off (to which he then stated "well, there's your problem right there"). He then proceeded to take the whole drive apart and see if he could fix it and get it to come up on my machine but that's a negative ghost rider!

Long story short, I'm guessing I'm going to need to get another drive. The drive will come on when it's powered up (it has a power supply and USB power cord that plug into the back). He suggested just go to Best Buy and they should be able to transfer over and I can buy a new one there. Just looking for advice on what to do (i.e., go to Best Buy or...) and what to buy (e.g., another Seagate, WD, etc. and how big...is 2TB still sufficient today?). Also, sounds like I should probably buy 2, maybe 3, and save it all on each. For reference, I'm basically storing pictures/videos of the kids from over the years and a few other random Excel, Word, PDF type files. Not storing any music or movies so I wouldn't think anything too large (but again...I'm certainly no IT guru).

Below is a picture of what I have now (hopefully this gives a bit more info of what I'm working with). First pic is of the HD label inside the casing and second is the power and USB port that broke off (power port is black piece at bottom right and I'm holding USB directly below where it should be on the circuit board).

View attachment 284885

View attachment 284886

Edit: IT guy suggested I get one of these and said it's the only way to get my stored files off my old hard drive and on to a new one.

https://www.amazon.com/SISUN-Dockin...ocphy=9009970&hvtargid=pla-568819850766&psc=1
Click to expand...

If there is stuff already on that drive that you have to have and is not replaceable, I can repair the USB connection so you can get data off of it. If all you need is any old drive to start backing stuff up, buy a new one.
 
@Fabrik8 to the rescue!

Access to the drive has been obtained and going to make a few copies in the coming days.

Thanks for the help gents!
 
pikapp691 said:
Cloud. Data is secure and backed up. You will never have to worry about that hard drive failing or connection issues.

IDrive Cloud Backup
Click to expand...
I have trust issues with cloud systems and storage that I do not have physical and total digital control over. Call me old school, but I have my own reservations about cloud storage and things not under my direct control. If I personally were to use the cloud, everything, sensitive or not, would be crypted before storage.
 
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3 laptops, mirror images of each other + 1 stand-alone backup on separate hard drive stored in another location. Recently, I have been looking at USB hard drives. I find this thread interesting, but have no useful info to share. I wouldn't store my work shoes on a cloud!
 
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