hard drives

Ladybird12345

Ladybird12345

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Just about to purchase some hard drives for back up
a friend of mine is recommending ......western digital passport ultra 500gb
are they all six of one half dosen of the other types of things
or are some better than others
what would you with experiance reccomend
Thanks
 
The biggest piece of advice I could give you would be to avoid any drives by Seagate. I know there will be people who disagree and say they never have any problems but I have had lots of Seagate drives fail and have had great success with Western Digital. I use the WD 3.5" external hard drives for backup.
 
ChrisWXM said:
The biggest piece of advice I could give you would be to avoid any drives by Seagate. I know there will be people who disagree and say they never have any problems but I have had lots of Seagate drives fail and have had great success with Western Digital. I use the WD 3.5" external hard drives for backup.
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Have to say I use Seagate external HDDs and have never had a problem - but I don't leave them plugged in, I only plug them in when I need them or to backup or to get something off them.
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petersmart said:
Have to say I use Seagate external HDDs and have never had a problem - but I don't leave them plugged in, I only plug them in when I need them or to backup or to get something off them.
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I think what you will find is that many people will have success stories with the majority of the manufacturers of drives and then there will be people who have also had lots of problems. I too used to use Seagate drives and had no issues until recently. I then had two Seagate externals fail within 2 months of buying them so I switched to WD. I still have some Seagate drives inside my PC which appear to be OK but who knows, like any hard drive they could fail without any warning at all. Maybe not leaving them plugged in could be the answer. Mine were plugged in all the time and set to backup every evening.
 
ChrisWXM said:
I think what you will find is that many people will have success stories with the majority of the manufacturers of drives and then there will be people who have also had lots of problems. I too used to use Seagate drives and had no issues until recently. I then had two Seagate externals fail within 2 months of buying them so I switched to WD. I still have some Seagate drives inside my PC which appear to be OK but who knows, like any hard drive they could fail without any warning at all. Maybe not leaving them plugged in could be the answer. Mine were plugged in all the time and set to backup every evening.
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Couldn't agree with this more. I've been using WD and have no issues but have found loads of reviews where others have. But when looking round found it was the case with any harddrive I could find a review for. I remember the adage "if data doesnt isn't held in three places it doesnt exist" and now try to follow that thinking in regards to my digital photos.
 
Backblaze who use lots of consumer grade drives publish drive reliability tables and Seagate have never faired very well.

A HDD is a mechanical device and susceptible to wear and failure. Personally, I buy more cheaper drives having mirrored raid status in my main and backup servers, mainly HGST bought at different times from different vendors to try and ensure they don't all go tits up at the same time.

Portable HDDs IME are just too fragile and I only use then for transient data.
 
even the lacie so called "rugged" drives (not sure a few small blocks of foam and a thin rubber coat counts as rugged) are pretty fragile.

i mean essentially it should not matter too much as long as you have multiple copies of your data across different drives (preferably from different manufacturer batches).

it's a shame that seagate bought out samsungs mechanical hard drive business, they always made very reliable drives (although i've had no bother from the 2 seagate desktops that I rotate off site).
 
I'd buy some empty external 3'5" enclosures such as this and fill 'em with nice standard WD Green drives. Buy much bigger drives than you need now as your data will grow plus you can keep multiple backups on each drive so have much more backup history should you need it.
 
If you're just buying drives for backing up data would it not be a better option to backup to the cloud? It's much more reliable.
 
neil_g said:
except when amazon lose your data :p

seriously though, the cloud isn't always feasible if you have a lot of data. the upload times can be daft.
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The first upload can be but after that it will be differential and if you're syncing files it will barely be noticeable.
 
To ensure I dont lose photos that are important to me, I'm backing up to two hardrives the RAW file as well as using an Apple Time capsule. But then saving images to jpeg and uploading those to the cloud. To upload the RAW files would be too much in terms of time and resource.
 
The problem with hard drives is that for most people it's leading them towards a false sense of security.

You want to backup your files, probably against these things:
Theft
Fire
Flood
Data or disk corruption

If you buy another drive to backup your files you're only going to get the benefit of protection against the last one on the list.

If you're not looking to store your backup drives in a fire-proof safe or store them off-site you're not getting proper protection.
 
The most reliable external drives I've used are Toshiba canvio 1TB usb3 2.5", and they are often the cheapest.
Not a single failure so far in a few years and five drives.
I now avoid Seagate like the plague.
 
I would recommend ...LaCie ..if you don't mind the cost .its not pricey but too good and strong and withstanding all my beating over the years.
 
Let me give you all some advice form someone who has worked in IT for the past 10 years in business and private sector.. Including running my own IT firm which provides Cloud Email systems and IT Support to Business customers... DO not rely on hard drives (External or other) for backup purposes. They are ok in the short term as temporary storage. But they do fail, they can fail when new and fail when old. They have moving parts in them and can fail without warning.

I have had several people come into our front counter, general public. Bearing hard drive in hand. Usually 1TB plus telling me that the hard drive no longer shows up on there computer and it stores all of there backups from way back when. I have had photographers and the likes come in also saying everything is on THAT drive. Plug into my testing station... Click.... Click..... Click.... Drive Borked.

You can send them away and some data can be retrieved but its slim pickings and can be expensive. The best bet if you can is buy 2 drives, this way you can mirror the drives within Windows so if one does fail you can at least have a mirror copy on the other drive. or the best alternative is to back everything up online. Although this can be costly depending on what and how much data you want to back up.

I personally have my own Storage server at home with 38TB of space running in a RAID configuration so everything is mirrored and have full redundancy. This is all backed up offsite to my local office where we have a 108TB Storage array. I also have backups of photos in Spain at a server farm which I run for another company where I manage the IT.

IF anyone needs any advice give me a shout... I'll gladly help.
 
neil_g said:
depends how many gigs of data you get from a shoot and the speed of your connection i guess.

but (for me) that initial upload would take weeks with TB of data, even on fibre.
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Would you rather lose anything than let large upload run in the background ? Once its done then it will only upload changes to files. or files that have been added. Its worth it....
 
Snapsh0t said:
I'd buy some empty external 3'5" enclosures such as this and fill 'em with nice standard WD Green drives. Buy much bigger drives than you need now as your data will grow plus you can keep multiple backups on each drive so have much more backup history should you need it.
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Use WD Reds, they are designed for rapid data storage and are more reliable than standard drives. The WD Reds are what is typically used in NAS devices.
 
Chris J said:
Use WD Reds, they are designed for rapid data storage and are more reliable than standard drives. The WD Reds are what is typically used in NAS devices.
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Reds really aren't needed for drives that are only used occasionally; it's exactly what Greens are intended for. I have a load of Reds in my NAS & servers where they belong but the off-line backup drives are Greens. Greens, however, are a poor choice for use in NAS or servers because they spin down too willingly.
 
Chris J said:
Let me give you all some advice form someone who has worked in IT for the past 10 years in business and private sector.. Including running my own IT firm which provides Cloud Email systems and IT Support to Business customers... DO not rely on hard drives (External or other) for backup purposes. They are ok in the short term as temporary storage. But they do fail, they can fail when new and fail when old. They have moving parts in them and can fail without warning.

I have had several people come into our front counter, general public. Bearing hard drive in hand. Usually 1TB plus telling me that the hard drive no longer shows up on there computer and it stores all of there backups from way back when. I have had photographers and the likes come in also saying everything is on THAT drive. Plug into my testing station... Click.... Click..... Click.... Drive Borked.

You can send them away and some data can be retrieved but its slim pickings and can be expensive. The best bet if you can is buy 2 drives, this way you can mirror the drives within Windows so if one does fail you can at least have a mirror copy on the other drive. or the best alternative is to back everything up online. Although this can be costly depending on what and how much data you want to back up.

I personally have my own Storage server at home with 38TB of space running in a RAID configuration so everything is mirrored and have full redundancy. This is all backed up offsite to my local office where we have a 108TB Storage array. I also have backups of photos in Spain at a server farm which I run for another company where I manage the IT.

IF anyone needs any advice give me a shout... I'll gladly help.
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SSD drives (Solid State Drive) have no moving parts
 
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How does "the Cloud" actually store data? Surely there must be some sort of physical drive (or array of drives) on which all the data is stored and which is (presumably) as susceptible to failure as any storage?

Personally, I use at least 2 external HDDs from different manufacturers (although the internals may well be the same!) and of differing ages (so hopefully any dodgy batches of internals that might be common to both manufacturers' offerings aren't replicated in my drives.) I also make optical disk copies of files that are important to me and check their viability from time to time. The very best photos also get printed to A3+ as a physical copy.
 
Basically, assuming I understand anything about it, the Cloud uses Storage Area Networks (SAN). Now you know what to look for, there are loads of interesting sites for you waste time exploring. ;)
One of the last things I did before leaving London was work on the first of two standby data centres for a company that provided race results to betting shops. I'd built the thirty-two(!) assorted servers and installed 'em in the racks then watched the specialists we'd hired install the local SAN. All I can remember now is that it was a long way outside my skill set.......
 
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Skimming a couple of the sites that Google threw at me, SAN is the way in which the data are shifted around but they didn't tell me what sort of storage they get kept in. One would hope that they keep several copies in several locations just in case.
 
It's mainly HDD but flash arrays are growing rapidly. And I agree, the data should be well distributed.
 
Chris J said:
Let me give you all some advice form someone who has worked in IT for the past 10 years in business and private sector.. Including running my own IT firm which provides Cloud Email systems and IT Support to Business customers... DO not rely on hard drives (External or other) for backup purposes. They are ok in the short term as temporary storage. But they do fail, they can fail when new and fail when old. They have moving parts in them and can fail without warning.

I have had several people come into our front counter, general public. Bearing hard drive in hand. Usually 1TB plus telling me that the hard drive no longer shows up on there computer and it stores all of there backups from way back when. I have had photographers and the likes come in also saying everything is on THAT drive. Plug into my testing station... Click.... Click..... Click.... Drive Borked.

You can send them away and some data can be retrieved but its slim pickings and can be expensive. The best bet if you can is buy 2 drives, this way you can mirror the drives within Windows so if one does fail you can at least have a mirror copy on the other drive. or the best alternative is to back everything up online. Although this can be costly depending on what and how much data you want to back up.

I personally have my own Storage server at home with 38TB of space running in a RAID configuration so everything is mirrored and have full redundancy. This is all backed up offsite to my local office where we have a 108TB Storage array. I also have backups of photos in Spain at a server farm which I run for another company where I manage the IT.

IF anyone needs any advice give me a shout... I'll gladly help.
Click to expand...

I quite like the idea of RAID storage but what would happen if one of the drives failed could you replace with another and resync? What would you recommend for RAID storage? What does full redundancy mean?
 
Yes, that's the whole point of RAID. What level of RAID you go for depends on the depth of your pockets and the amount of data you want to store.
The simplest is RAID1 which has two drives in a mirrored formation. It's quite possible that your existing PC can do this, depending on the motherboard and space in the case. You should still have some form of external backup as well.
The most common after that for home users is RAID5 which spreads the data across three or more drives at the cost of the capacity of one drive to provide the redundancy. In one job, one drive in a five-drive RAID5 array failed while I was on holiday and no-one noticed any difference in performance.
RAID1 & RAID5 both allow for one drive to fail without losing data. Next is RAID6 where two drives can fail at once without loss of data but with two drives used to give the resilience. For example, five drives in RAID6 will only give three drives of data. After that it gets much more complex and beyond the vast majority of home users. I'll leave investigating RAID50 and 51, etc. as an exercise for the student. ;)

If you need an external box to hold the drives then you can buy a simple two-drive NAS (but buy a decent brand, the sheep response here is Synology but QNAP and Asustor are just as good), pop in a couple of WD Red drives of whatever capacity you want and the job's done. If you want more than two drives then you can buy a four bay NAS (or more) but you're looking at £400 for something worthwhile plus the drives. If you're prepared to do some work you can either buy an HP Microserver and load the OS of your choice or you can do a full DIY project with your choice of components.
I have or have had all the above options so can give my prejudiced advice on request.....

It might be worth putting a request in the Wanted section to see what pops up....
 
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