Re: OT: External hard drive opinions? - Saab General Bulletin Board - Saabnet.com
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Re: OT: External hard drive opinions?
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Posted by Ari2 [Email] (more from Ari2) on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 10:05:47 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: OT: External hard drive opinions?, Bob Falfa, Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:18:06
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I use external drives all the time. You can certainly find plenty of anecdotal discussion all over the net, where somebody has a particular brand of drive fail on them and announces "Quantum drives STINK!!!!!" and one person's experience is taken out of all proportion. I generally buy drives that offer the longest manufacturer's warranty I can find (usually IBM). Sure, warranty lengths are sometimes dictated more by marketing concerns than by the manufacturer's confidence in its product, but overall, the manufacturer's warranty duration is probably the best indicator of the reliability you can expect, in the aggregate at least, from a particular drive. You can look at MTBF claims ("mean time between failures"), but these are made-up numbers -- when a drive first comes on the market, the manufacturer doesn't have enough statistical experience with its performance in the field to know what the actual MTBF will be, and so bases the number on prior experience with "similar" drives...it's pretty theoretical.

Beyond that: I think my biggest concern would be that whatever drive I get can be connected to any computer on the planet, so that when it comes time to retrieve data from it, it won't matter what kind of computer I'm trying to retrieve the data onto. Assuming you have a USB 2 port on your "aging" laptop, get a drive that's contained in a housing with a USB connector -- pretty much every computer you'll run into these days has at least one USB port on it. If your computer only has USB 1, you'll definitely want to get a USB 2 port for it (for example, you can get a PCMCIA card that converts from your PCI bus to USB 2.) Transferring data at USB 1 speeds is PAINFULLY slow, but at USB 2 speeds, it's pretty blazing. I'd use USB rather than firewire, just because firewire isn't as universal as USB. Also, when you format your new drive, make sure to format it as FAT32 rather than NTFS, so that you'll be able to retrieve data from that drive using a Win98 machine as well as WinXP/2000 machines, should you ever need to.

When you put data on your drive, I would avoid using specialized "backup" programs that format the data in a way that only the "backup" program can read back, even if they offer "data compression" and similar benefits. In my experience, it's best to save data on your backup drive in as generic a manner as possible, so that you do not need specialized software (which you might not have handy when you need it) to pull the data back off.




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