External Hard Drive questions

Kerioak

Kerioak

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Hi, I currently use 2 x 2 TB external hard drives for (mostly) my images , keeping one off site and the other permanently connected to my (PC) laptop.

However these are now getting somewhat full so I am looking at getting something larger as I like to be able to access my pictures without connecting and disconnecting various drives.

If I get a 4 TB system that has raid does this mean it is really 2 x 2 TB?

Can you get external hard drives that can be linked to each other?

What would anyone suggest for a fairly non IT savvy person who wants a decent amount of external hard drive connected to laptop?
 
despends on the raid. raid 1 (mirrored) wont equal 4tb unless you have 4x 2tb, 2x 2tb in raid 0 will but isnt a safe method (1 drive dies all data is gone). raid 5 would with 1 drive failure option needs 3x 2tb to equal 4tb.

(all values not inclusive of overheads so will be slightly below the stated)
 
depends what operating system youre on, whether you want the raid attached via USB/firewire/sata or over the network (my NAS presents a 7tb drive to windows 7). you can use drives over 2tb with windows they just need to be set up in the right way.
 
I am on Windows 7 Home Premium - I have always used USB cables but am open to different options providing they are easy to set up/use and are going to let me open/save files at reasonable speed (I do quite a bit of editing so my files can get very large).

Can I ask what you use and if I go that route can I ask for help to set it up properly?
 
Kerioak said:
Got as far as looking at the personal cloud stuff - has anyone any experience of this please ?
Click to expand...

You want to use the cloud to store 4TB of pictures?

A recent survey found that top upload speeds from ISPs was around 3 Mbps - or around 0.4 MB/s. So uploading 4,000,000 MB is going to take you around 10,000,000 seconds - which is just about 4 months! And that assumes your ISP actually means 'unlimited' for it's upload allowances.
 
Kerioak said:
So I need to avoid anything with Raid as it seems that 4Tb is the largest available for windows unless I go for a cloud thingy - anyone have an recommendations or otherwise for personal clouds - don't want to put pictures on net
Click to expand...

You can try having two sets of Raid1 (Mirroring) 2x2GB. Would be wise to use mirroring to ensure that if one disk breaks down you have a backup.
 
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