External hard drive.. (Page 4): Simply throwing money at this isn't the way to go. If you can manage your own backups and don't need offsite storage it just isn't very expensive. If...

robertcbyrd Loc: 28754

Simply throwing money at this isn't the way to go.

If you can manage your own backups and don't need offsite storage it just isn't very expensive. If you want to do it faster spend more money on SSD's, but their capacities are small. If you need RAID 3 or RAID 5 for it.

If my house burns down I hope to be able to grab my dog, my two cats, my wife and one of my itty bitty 4TB hard drives [not necessarily in that order ;-)]

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

robertcbyrd wrote:

Simply throwing money at this isn't the way to go.

If you can manage your own backups and don't need offsite storage it just isn't very expensive. If you want to do it faster spend more money on SSD's, but their capacities are small. If you need RAID 3 or RAID 5 for it.

If my house burns down I hope to be able to grab my dog, my two cats, my wife and one of my itty bitty 4TB hard drives [not necessarily in that order ;-)]

Everyone needs a 3rd off-site copy of their data for disaster recovery. That on-site backup that you hope to grab on the way out won’t be useful if the house burns while you’re gone, floods, is hit by lightning, is robbed or subject to an electrical surge. The money spent on DR is like insurance - just a cost until you need it, but when you do, it’s worth its weight in gold.

Dikdik Loc: Winnipeg, Canada

TriX:

Good advice...

Dik

bikerguy

TriX wrote:

With HDs, like most everything else, you get what you pay for - there is no free lunch. You spend thousands of $ on camera equipment to do one thing - record data. Unless that data is worthless to you, do you really want to trust it to a $50 drive? You probably spent that much or more on your strap.

I would rather have 2 inexpensive hard drives for my back than one expensive drive. Any drive can, and probably at some point will, fail. By having three copies on three separate hard drives I have pretty much eliminated the risk of data loss from equipment failure. If one of my drives was to die today, I would simply replace it and more on. I have been using computers with hard drives since the battery powered Compaq in the early 1990's and have never had a hard drive fail. Currently my travel backup hard drive is a 1 TB Seagate drive that is at least 10 years old. It is one of two backups that I make every night when we are travelling.

Retina Loc: Near Charleston,SC

connievloutely wrote:

I am looking for some advice on an external hard drive with a capacity of 2 tb.

I have used Seagate and western digital in the past.

what is the current best brand for reliability.

Your thoughts please!

I recommend not going over 2GB. Experience over the past several years tells me WD over Seagate and Toshiba. Treat it like a baby and try not to move it when it is running.

Mike1017

Western digital I have 11 of them you can buy a 4 tb ( passports ) little over $100.00 bucks Mike

Wallmart no joke

NormanTheGr8 Loc: Racine, Wisconsin

I use 2 passports just for my photos , and me and my brother in law have a WD Mycloud in each others home that we back up our systems to so they are seperated by 2 counties (his cloud is in my house and mine in his )His job is Cyber Security and I have no idea what security protocals he has installed I just know it works😁 every computer on my net work will sync every 24 hrs

davesit Loc: Lansing, New York

A friend of mine swears by Silicon Power external hard drives. They are supposedly shock-proof and quite reasonably-priced.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XH2ZDXW/ref=psdc_595048_t1_B07KJBJTGZ

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

I've been using a Seagate 1T for the last few years. Never a hang or failure.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

bikerguy wrote:

I would rather have 2 inexpensive hard drives for ... (show quote)

Well, two inexpensive (mirrored) HDs are better than one, but why not two mirrored enterprise drives? Do they cost more? Yes, but how much is your data worth? I have been in IT since 1965 and specialized in data storage with all the major data storage players for the last 25, and I have seen every type of drive failure imaginable including double drive failures in RAID sets. A data loss for any of those companies was a mortal sin, followed by a loss of future business, so I BELIEVE in data integrity. All drives eventually fail, but in general, enterprise drives take longer.

If your data is important to you, I have the following advice. Take it or leave it - almost every week we have some poor soul start a thread that begins with: “my HD (or drives) failed, and I lost 30 years of images”.: the advice is: keep 3 copies of your data - a working copy, a local backup and an off-site DR copy. Buy the best enterprise drives you can afford and if external, keep them cool with a fan. Your choice.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

One thing that can be said about ALL Hard Disk Drives is it is not IF they will fail, but WHEN! As others have said, buy the good ones. Non-drive companies like LaCie (now owned by Seagate) and G-Tech use a wide variety of sometimes unknown drives. I have had great luck, over many years, with both Seagate and WD. Best of luck.

jhgribble Loc: Michigan

I will tell you that others are correct, don't go cheap buy the higher end drive. But also consider a Nas unit that can house two or 4 drives. With that type of system there are multiple options of replacing a failed drive and not lose your data. Plus over time if you exceed the capacity you can replace one drive at a time to a higher density and obtain more capacity as needed. You can also purchase higher density drives to put in your PC and then go with online backups in the cloud, such as Google, OneDrive, Carbonite, or the new one someone suggested the other day called backblaze.

John

was_a_guru

Check out this site: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&ei=ABFwXfK4Fovy-gSs2Jb4AQ&q=backblaze+drive+report&oq=backblaze+drive&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.1.0.0l5j33i299l2j33i160.9289.12755..18923...0.1..0.318.1090.0j5j0j1......0....1.........0i71.ew-udpEPaFM

They do an annual report on drive reliability based off of their data backup business. The drives they report on are usually large capacity but the the data can probably be extrapolated to smaller capacity versions by manufacturer.

dcearls Loc: Long Island, NY

SSD's are awesome .... Small, fast and as stated no moving parts to wear... which also means that as a purely electronic device they either work or they don't. They can, and do fail and when they do it can be with no warning whatsoever.

ewforbess Loc: San Antonio, TX

I have two identical Seagate 4TB drives (my D: and E; drives) that I've used for years. Expendable data files usually just go to D:, but I save important files/photos to both. I can't imagine they would both die at exactly the same time... :-D