External Hard Drive suggestions

[LilBeaver]

I went out today and bought a HD enclosure and a Western Digital 2TB RED NAS 3.5" drive that I'm going to partition and format as one large drive to clone my drive. The Red drives come with a 5 year warranty and if the drive fails within the warranty period WD will recover the data at no charge.

 

You will get PLENTY of opinions on this matter (think Oil, magic spark plugs, fuel additives, air filters, etc etc) but in my opinion and experience, this is absolutely the way to go (a quality drive and your own enclosure). The 'Red' series NAS drives are 'rated' for 'network attached storage'. As you noted, they carry the 5 year warranty and specs that are nominally equivalent to the server class drives. IN fact, I have been hard pressed to find differences between the Red NAS and Black RE/Enterprise series drives. One MAJOR problem I have with almost any of the pre-packaged external drives on the market is that the companies (WD included) end up using cheap drives in their enclosures. For example, WD was using their "Green" drives for a while, which have a unreasonably high failure rate.

Anyway, I was reading your thread and about to suggest you put together your own external drive package.

 

The Acronis software is nearly fool proof, so long as you READ and FOLLOW the instructions. As Tx2sturgis indicated, doing a clone over USB will take awhile. Depending on how saavy you are, you can always just plug the drive in internally, do the clone and then put it back in the enclosure for later access. Or just set it up to run over night or whatever. It has been a long time since I have had to do a complete image over USB 2 (I usually use esata, the internal method or USB 3) but if you are prepped for it taking a while then no worries -- just plug it in, set it up and let it do its thing.

Depending on what you are looking for with this back up and what your current internal drive is, I would most likely do what Tx2sturgis suggested with respect to clone your current drive and use your fancy new drive as your primary drive (which I can nearly guarantee will be way faster than whatever you have in there now) and pop your old 600GB one in your enclosure to use for backups.

 

 

 

I won't buy WD's had way too many failures. If your gonna get seagates then get the constellations ( server rated). The problem with a lot of today's drives is they have gotten cheaper and can't take being left on 24x7x365. IBM and Hitachi's I don't have problems with. If your gonna use it for your backup get server rated drives. They cost more but are worth it. Then get a usb housing and stuff it in that...

 

5-10 years ago I would have agreed with you about western digital drives but they seem to have come a long way. All drives fail eventually, it is just how it goes. I know it is somewhat anecdotal, but in the last couple of server upgrades I have gone with WD (Granted they are the Black enterprise series drives - i.e. server class, which I am sure you know) and of the 56 drives (on 24x7 for almost 5 years now -- hardware has been updated and some of these drives have been moved to other machines; desktops and servers) I have had only 2 issues with these WD drives. One was dead out of the box, which based on what the shipping container looked like I am quite certain it was due to the shipper (the box looked like someone was using it for kickball -- the shipper bought us a new drive, no questions asked). The second one turned out to be a bad cable -- my RAID card kicked it out of the array, so I put it in a desktop to test it... and that was 3.5 years ago and it is still chugging along just fine.

 

Seagates on the other hand, ha. Until about 4 years ago, those were pretty good too. In the last 4 years the only thing reliable about the seagates that come through my department is that they fail within the first 6 months or about half way through the warranty period -- whether they are run 24x7 or only used as backup drives.

[LilBeaver]

I read probably 80% of the text in this thread - not sure how I did that 'cause I never could read nor understand greek before.

 

So - with that previous statement in mind, how can I back up my Imac (using 10.7.5 os 3.4ghz Intel core i7)) ?

 

second - how do I back up my Imac (using W7 Ultimate 3.4ghz. Intel Core i7) ?

 

I know I will have to use 2 separate external hd's and I have a ton of picture, don't really care about music, address book is critical and how do I know if it actually saved anything ?

 

If all you care about is the data, backups are pretty easy -- Just get yourself a reliable drive and put the stuff you want to save on it. Done. Having stuff saved in multiple places reduces the risk of a total loss

You do NOT need fancy backup software (sometimes it helps but often time it just slows down your system while it 'indexes' or whatever) -- all you need is a reliable drive, safe place to store it and to remember to actually DO the backups

[LilBeaver]

No, dont format the drive unless you want to erase all data on the disk. Something in the HP is not recognizing the drive...

 

+1 to this.

Formatting your drive will erase everything. *poof* gone.

 

While we are talking about Winders 7 and external drives,

I have a 500GB WD (USB)external that works fine on my WinXP machines and even on my Win7 Home Premium Acer netbook, but when I plug it into my Win7 Pro HP desktop, I get a message that the new drive is not formatted, do I want to format it? Why would that be?

 

I would go ahead and try something simple like plug the external drive into a different set of USB ports on the HP desktop and see if you get the same error message. If so, try a different USB cable. If the error persists, plug your drive into a machine that it actually works with and run the 'check disk' tool [right click on the drive in my computer --> Properties --> Tools --> "Error checking/Check now" (or something like that). It would also not be a bad idea to download "crystal disk info" or something to read the S.M.A.R.T. information off the disk to see if maybe you have an unusually high bad sector count or something else that may be suggesting failure is near.

[etcswjoe]

Another solution is LTO or DTO drives.

[Guest tx2sturgis]

I read probably 80% of the text in this thread - not sure how I did that 'cause I never could read nor understand greek before.

 

So - with that previous statement in mind, how can I back up my Imac (using 10.7.5 os 3.4ghz Intel core i7)) ?

 

second - how do I back up my Imac (using W7 Ultimate 3.4ghz. Intel Core i7) ?

 

I know I will have to use 2 separate external hd's and I have a ton of picture, don't really care about music, address book is critical and how do I know if it actually saved anything ?

 

 

Oh this is where it gets EAZY PEAZY!

 

Time Machine (backup software).

 

Its included in IOS and works slick. Just buy a good external drive, plug it in, launch Time Machine, and it will ask you which drive you want to use. Configure it as needed (including formatting) and it will then make a full backup, which will take a while, but then it will make incremental backups every hour from now on.

 

The cool thing about Time Machine is that when you accidentally delete a file on Thursday, you just launch time machine and select say, Tuesday, and voila, there is the file!

 

After its been running for awhile, you can even go back, say 10 months, and look at the desktop or a photo album or any folder as it appeared then, with all files and programs as they were back then.

 

You dont have to buy the Apple Time Capsule (physical server-grade hard drive), but if you do, it can work over the wifi network (or plugged into your wifi router) so that it can be running in another room, unattended, and unseen, and backing up ALL of your Macs whenever they are in range of the unit. The Time Capsule drive also comes with a wifi router built-in, so it can be used as a whole-house wifi base station, OR a wifi extender.

 

If you want to have a completely stand-alone safe archive, just let Time Machine run for a week or two, test out all the programs, files, folders, settings, and such, then disconnect the drive, and let it remain stored away. It will be safe from almost anything, other than physical damage, and will be ready to recover from any possible failed hard drive in your iMac.

 

You can of course, buy and use another drive as your hourly/daily Time Machine backup drive.

 

Its a cool solution.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28Mac_OS%29

Edited November 5, 2013 by tx2sturgis

[GAWildKat]

You will get PLENTY of opinions on this matter (think Oil, magic spark plugs, fuel additives, air filters, etc etc) but in my opinion and experience, this is absolutely the way to go (a quality drive and your own enclosure). The 'Red' series NAS drives are 'rated' for 'network attached storage'. As you noted, they carry the 5 year warranty and specs that are nominally equivalent to the server class drives. IN fact, I have been hard pressed to find differences between the Red NAS and Black RE/Enterprise series drives. One MAJOR problem I have with almost any of the pre-packaged external drives on the market is that the companies (WD included) end up using cheap drives in their enclosures. For example, WD was using their "Green" drives for a while, which have a unreasonably high failure rate.

Anyway, I was reading your thread and about to suggest you put together your own external drive package.

 

The Acronis software is nearly fool proof, so long as you READ and FOLLOW the instructions. As Tx2sturgis indicated, doing a clone over USB will take awhile. Depending on how saavy you are, you can always just plug the drive in internally, do the clone and then put it back in the enclosure for later access. Or just set it up to run over night or whatever. It has been a long time since I have had to do a complete image over USB 2 (I usually use esata, the internal method or USB 3) but if you are prepped for it taking a while then no worries -- just plug it in, set it up and let it do its thing.

Depending on what you are looking for with this back up and what your current internal drive is, I would most likely do what Tx2sturgis suggested with respect to clone your current drive and use your fancy new drive as your primary drive (which I can nearly guarantee will be way faster than whatever you have in there now) and pop your old 600GB one in your enclosure to use for backups.

 

 

 

 

 

5-10 years ago I would have agreed with you about western digital drives but they seem to have come a long way. All drives fail eventually, it is just how it goes. I know it is somewhat anecdotal, but in the last couple of server upgrades I have gone with WD (Granted they are the Black enterprise series drives - i.e. server class, which I am sure you know) and of the 56 drives (on 24x7 for almost 5 years now -- hardware has been updated and some of these drives have been moved to other machines; desktops and servers) I have had only 2 issues with these WD drives. One was dead out of the box, which based on what the shipping container looked like I am quite certain it was due to the shipper (the box looked like someone was using it for kickball -- the shipper bought us a new drive, no questions asked). The second one turned out to be a bad cable -- my RAID card kicked it out of the array, so I put it in a desktop to test it... and that was 3.5 years ago and it is still chugging along just fine.

 

Seagates on the other hand, ha. Until about 4 years ago, those were pretty good too. In the last 4 years the only thing reliable about the seagates that come through my department is that they fail within the first 6 months or about half way through the warranty period -- whether they are run 24x7 or only used as backup drives.

 

I agree and don't agree on the Seagate drives, back in the mid 90's as a college student I worked in the computer labs on campus. Part of my job was to repair all the student/teacher computers on campus, several thousand computers. All the computers had seagate drives at the time. The failure rate was so high that we ordered several hundred drives a quarter, in anticipation of drive failures during term. Keep in mind, as a student worker I worked 20 hrs/week on the clock. I would replace maybe 10 drives a day on campus, which meant more than once I worked off the clock too, since the school only hired 8 students to manage the entire campus. At the time I preferred maxtor drives, those were reliable regardless of price point. Now that they are part of seagate I won't touch them. Yes, computer geek talk is a lot like car/bike talk to us geeks. There are times I even go over Mike's head with computer parts talk (I got myself Intel certified this yr lol)

[ragtop69gs]

OK.. here's my next question.

 

I have decided (I think) that instead of using the external drive that uses a usb2 connection to do the clone, I am going to install the new drive into my pc to do the clone. This should make cloning faster.

 

When I reboot the the pc it's going to see the brand new drive and I'll partition and format it, windows will want to mark this drive as E or F most likely, when I clone the existing C: drive to this new HD, is the letter assigned during the partition and format going to be a problem when I do as Brian suggested and use this a my system drive, or will I need to change the drive letter of the clone?

 

I plan to use the free Acronis software offered by WD to do the cloning.

 

Here is a link to the new HD specs http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=1086&language=1

 

Edited November 5, 2013 by ragtop69gs

[Guest tx2sturgis]

is the letter assigned during the partition and format going to be a problem when I do as Brian suggested and use this a my system drive, or will I need to change the drive letter of the clone?

 

 

 

 

The drive letter is assigned sequentially every time the computer boots up, so that wont be a problem. You might have to move the drive to another slot on the cable or change a setting for master and slave, (primary and seconday) depending on that particular computer.

 

BTW, A: drive and B: drive are never used anymore, since they were always reserved in the early days for two floppy drives, which are, of course, no longer used.

 

Anyway, just assign a name during the partition/formatting such as WD-2TB or JaysNewDrive..it can be almost anything, just so you can recognize it in a multi-drive situation.

 

 

Another BTW...Western Digital is coming out with some interesting new drives in the near future...high capacity, 6TB, helium-filled drives.

 

The helium is lighter than normal atmosphere, of course, so it presents less drag on the internal platters.

 

Probably will cost more in the beginning, but like every new technology, the price will come down as time goes on.

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57610621-92/western-digital-enlists-helium-for-6tb-energy-efficient-drives/

Edited November 5, 2013 by tx2sturgis

[calperin]

Ray,

 

If you have a spare PC, just put a BIG HD, and install Nas4Free as a network NAS.

 

Then you can create a Share where you can BackUp all the images you want.

 

Once is done, you can shut down the NAS, or not, but you can disconnect the share to be safe of attacks.

 

Is really simple, and cheap if you have a machine that you don't use any more.

 

Don't need to be LAST TECHNOLOGY. Only big HD.

 

Regards,

 

Carlos

 

PD: Let me know if you need help.

[LilBeaver]

OK.. here's my next question.

 

I have decided (I think) that instead of using the external drive that uses a usb2 connection to do the clone, I am going to install the new drive into my pc to do the clone. This should make cloning faster.

 

When I reboot the the pc it's going to see the brand new drive and I'll partition and format it, windows will want to mark this drive as E or F most likely, when I clone the existing C: drive to this new HD, is the letter assigned during the partition and format going to be a problem when I do as Brian suggested and use this a my system drive, or will I need to change the drive letter of the clone?

 

I plan to use the free Acronis software offered by WD to do the cloning.

 

Here is a link to the new HD specs http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=1086&language=1

 

 

EASY and SHORT answer:

The Acronis software will take care of creating the partition table and formatting the drive for you so don't worry about it and when Windows prompts you to format the drive, just say no and go through the process with the Acronis software.

Easy as can be.

[LilBeaver]

I agree and don't agree on the Seagate drives, back in the mid 90's as a college student I worked in the computer labs on campus. Part of my job was to repair all the student/teacher computers on campus, several thousand computers. All the computers had seagate drives at the time. The failure rate was so high that we ordered several hundred drives a quarter, in anticipation of drive failures during term. Keep in mind, as a student worker I worked 20 hrs/week on the clock. I would replace maybe 10 drives a day on campus, which meant more than once I worked off the clock too, since the school only hired 8 students to manage the entire campus. At the time I preferred maxtor drives, those were reliable regardless of price point. Now that they are part of seagate I won't touch them. Yes, computer geek talk is a lot like car/bike talk to us geeks. There are times I even go over Mike's head with computer parts talk (I got myself Intel certified this yr lol)

 

Fair enough. I should have been more careful with my statement to include a time frame on when I thought the segates were alright. haha.

What I have noticed in the last several years is that segates will be good while WD was bad, and then when segates took a dive WD came back...

You couldn't pay me to take a seagate...

[ragtop69gs]

Ray,

 

If you have a spare PC, just put a BIG HD, and install Nas4Free as a network NAS.

 

Then you can create a Share where you can BackUp all the images you want.

 

Once is done, you can shut down the NAS, or not, but you can disconnect the share to be safe of attacks.

 

Is really simple, and cheap if you have a machine that you don't use any more.

 

Don't need to be LAST TECHNOLOGY. Only big HD.

 

Regards,

 

Carlos

 

PD: Let me know if you need help.

 

Carlos, Give me a call, let's talk about this. I do have an older XP box with a 650GB drive. only problem with it is I can't get it to connect to my network. It only wants to connect thru dialup not the network cable.

[LilBeaver]

[...]

 

Another BTW...Western Digital is coming out with some interesting new drives in the near future...high capacity, 6TB, helium-filled drives.

 

The helium is lighter than normal atmosphere, of course, so it presents less drag on the internal platters.

 

Probably will cost more in the beginning, but like every new technology, the price will come down as time goes on.

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57610621-92/western-digital-enlists-helium-for-6tb-energy-efficient-drives/

 

For what it is worth, the energy efficiency claim (with respect to drag) for the use of He in the drives is a gimmick (and I have seen it plenty of places and did work out the math at one point -- yeah, I am a dork... I admit it... but it is okay since that is my job). The use of He is likely as simple as an exchange gas to help with heat transfer away from the platters, read heads, spindle and other internal components. Also, purified He can be quite clean and hence if put in a sealed drive, can help maintain a contaminate free environment. Drives now are vented to the atmosphere which present their own problems...

[calperin]

Carlos, Give me a call, let's talk about this. I do have an older XP box with a 650GB drive. only problem with it is I can't get it to connect to my network. It only wants to connect thru dialup not the network cable.

Sure, let me see if I have your phone #.

Can you send me a text to 248-372-1940?

 

Thanks,

[Guest tx2sturgis]

For what it is worth, the energy efficiency claim (with respect to drag) for the use of He in the drives is a gimmick

 

Well, hmmm..they claim less power used when the drives are spinning in helium at 15,000 rpm than when in normal atmosphere...but what do I know....it could be less drag for the read/write heads as they move...really I'm out of my element on that stuff...

 

[etcswjoe]

Isn't Seagate and Maxtor the same company?

[GAWildKat]

Isn't Seagate and Maxtor the same company?

 

Seagate acquired Maxtor in 2006, before that they were separate companies. And Maxtor was the best hard drive manufacturer in the business imho at least in the 90's.

[Hummingbird]

Oh this is where it gets EAZY PEAZY!

 

Time Machine (backup software).

 

Its included in IOS and works slick. Just buy a good external drive, plug it in, launch Time Machine, and it will ask you which drive you want to use. Configure it as needed (including formatting) and it will then make a full backup, which will take a while, but then it will make incremental backups every hour from now on.

 

The cool thing about Time Machine is that when you accidentally delete a file on Thursday, you just launch time machine and select say, Tuesday, and voila, there is the file!

 

After its been running for awhile, you can even go back, say 10 months, and look at the desktop or a photo album or any folder as it appeared then, with all files and programs as they were back then.

 

You dont have to buy the Apple Time Capsule (physical server-grade hard drive), but if you do, it can work over the wifi network (or plugged into your wifi router) so that it can be running in another room, unattended, and unseen, and backing up ALL of your Macs whenever they are in range of the unit. The Time Capsule drive also comes with a wifi router built-in, so it can be used as a whole-house wifi base station, OR a wifi extender.

 

If you want to have a completely stand-alone safe archive, just let Time Machine run for a week or two, test out all the programs, files, folders, settings, and such, then disconnect the drive, and let it remain stored away. It will be safe from almost anything, other than physical damage, and will be ready to recover from any possible failed hard drive in your iMac.

 

You can of course, buy and use another drive as your hourly/daily Time Machine backup drive.

 

Its a cool solution.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_%28Mac_OS%29

 

Do I need an external for each Imac ? The second Imac runs W7 Ultimate only, I don't think there is anything on the mac partition that I care about.

[spear]

I'm wondering if there's a PC forum somewhere that deals with bike problems?

[GAWildKat]

Funny thing is...I don't have a bike...the husband has 2!. I'm just a computer hardware geek. But the funny thing is with all Mike's bike troubles between the 2 bikes, I'm the one that goes looking for the troubleshooting things and gives him all the things that apply. I guess those yrs as a computer tech translate well to mechanics? lol

[Woody]

what about solid state drives, where do they fit in to all this discussion?

[Guest tx2sturgis]

what about solid state drives, where do they fit in to all this discussion?

 

They speed up the read/write acccess times for the OS on your computer (a LOT) but are not really suitable for mass external storage since they tend to be more expensive per GB than standard spinning drives.

 

 

[Guest tx2sturgis]

Do I need an external for each Imac ? The second Imac runs W7 Ultimate only, I don't think there is anything on the mac partition that I care about.

 

Well, not technically, but drives are cheap. You can get a couple of 1TB 2.5 inch drives on ebay, for probably $100 to $125 total. 500GB drives are a bit cheaper, and the USB to SATA cable will run less than $10. You dont need a drive enclosure...just the cable.

 

I would not backup 2 machines on one drive...if that drive fails or gets stolen or damaged then 2 full machine backups are lost and that could be a problem.

 

If however you buy an Apple Time Capsule you can easily backup multiple machines...but as I said...if something were to happen to that one drive, you got nuttin.

 

Is the second iMac running ONLY Win7 or is it running Windows on a virtual machine or with bootcamp?

 

If the iMac has the underlying IOS running as a shell around Win7 then TimeMachine will still operate.

 

If you are directly booting into Windows and/or IOS is being bypassed, then Time Machine wont work and you will need to run a Windows backup strategy, such as Acronis.

 

 

 

[Guest tx2sturgis]

I just want to say this, to everyone following and posting to this thread:

 

I'm glad this discussion is happening, and people are taking charge of their computer and its backups.

 

Nothing is more aggravating to me than seeing threads on this board where a member posts that XYZ virus wiped his shiny new desktop pc, or that the wife's laptop motherboard is failing and he cant get access to all the daughters wedding pics..or whatever.

 

Hardware is cheap.

 

Data equals memories and a lot of work, and sometimes its irreplaceable.

 

 

 

[ragtop69gs]

Well after all this discussion on what's & how's, Carlos has graciously offered to help me put together a NAS box to backup and store all my pc data. Seems like the best solution. Think I'll go get another Hd to extend the capacity.

 

This has been an extreamly informative subject, thanks to all the contributors.