What Kind of External Back up hard drive should I get?

GeneO · 30 Jan 2011

mjf said:

GeneO said:

I get 120 MB/s from 2TB WD Green external (eSATA).

Hmm Interesting.

For the average person browsing the forum with say a notebook if you get a usb drive drive at a good price - go for it. Yes definitely have at least 2. Keep a reasonably uptodate image on both ideally with 2 imaging packages and your set.

I have 2.5 inch 5400/5200 rpm portables and 3.5 inch 7200 rpm. There is a noticeable difference in speed but not a major factor for me. If I'm not using the externals I turn them off. I try to keep my regular images to around 50GB.

My experience as well is that the 3.5 in 7200 rpm can get much hotter than the 5400 portables. I use a $10 fan to keep the temp down on a hot day.

What do you mean, Hmm interesting - don't you believe me?

Makes for an excellent backup device. Regardless, if you are using USB 2.0, the drive speed is relevant only as it affects the drive temperature.

pparks1 · 30 Jan 2011

GeneO,

I think part of the problem might be how we describe our benchmarks. For example, based on that HDTune results that you posted and your WD Caviar Green...I would look at those results and say that my drive benchmarked in the 95MB/sec arena. However, if you go based on the maximum speed of the drive than 121MB/sec is what you would say. But we would both be describing the same thing.

For example, I posted the HD Tune results of my 7200.12 on page 1 of this thread. It maxed around 124MB/sec, minimum of 63MB/sec. But if I were talking to a friend, I would say the drive is right around 100MB/sec as that is what it averages.

GeneO · 30 Jan 2011

pparks1 said:

GeneO,

I think part of the problem might be how we describe our benchmarks. For example, based on that HDTune results that you posted and your WD Caviar Green...I would look at those results and say that my drive benchmarked in the 95MB/sec arena. However, if you go based on the maximum speed of the drive than 121MB/sec is what you would say. But we would both be describing the same thing.

For example, I posted the HD Tune results of my 7200.12 on page 1 of this thread. It maxed around 124MB/sec, minimum of 63MB/sec. But if I were talking to a friend, I would say the drive is right around 100MB/sec as that is what it averages.

I was responding to the usage on the first page - quoting a drive doing 120MB/s based on its top hd tune speed.

In any case, the implied claim was that 7200 rpm drives outperform 5400 rpm drives, which clearly isn't always true. And in this case, a lower, cooler rpm drive performs just as well as a 7200 one for sequential reads, and is more suitable for external use.

linnemeyerhere · 30 Jan 2011

I have both the Seagate FreeAgent Pro and the WD My Book Studio Edition they are both fine products with firewire/usb2.0/eSata connections. In my opinion I would purchase a quality enclosure and place one two or several quality drives in it making sure that each drive has at least 16mb of cache and actually prefer 32-64mb's all spinning at 7200 or 10,000 rpm when speed is needed and who doesn't want speed ! The advantage with this is the drives are clean with out all the preloaded software/bloatware.

Josh7 · 31 Jan 2011

I'm not trying to be mean here but none of you answered my questions, you kinda just talked about your things...I defiantly wanna no how does the image software work? I don't get it why would I need it if everything goes on the hard drive anyway?

linnemeyerhere · 31 Jan 2011

You don't need it as long as you have a mind like a steel trap and never forget to bring things over or do daily, weekly or at least regular back ups. You can set up a fine back up with W7, so just get a drive and go to town. Now if you want to have the software watch for and do incremental back ups then that's another issue and I like Acronis for that.

essenbe · 31 Jan 2011

Image software restores your entire operating system, programs and files to exactly like it was when you took the image. File and folder type backups just backup items in your libraries such as documents, photos, music.

If your hard drive dies or the OS becomes corrupted, it is much simpler to use an image and restore everything at once. Without an image you must reinstall Windows, install programs, windows settings set up email accounts, ect. If you do not have backups, you lose all of your emails, documents, photos etc.

I hope this explains the difference.

Josh7 · 01 Feb 2011

essenbe said:

Image software restores your entire operating system, programs and files to exactly like it was when you took the image. File and folder type backups just backup items in your libraries such as documents, photos, music.

If your hard drive dies or the OS becomes corrupted, it is much simpler to use an image and restore everything at once. Without an image you must reinstall Windows, install programs, windows settings set up email accounts, ect. If you do not have backups, you lose all of your emails, documents, photos etc.

I hope this explains the difference.

Yes, it kinda does. What does the Image save on? can you save on the back up hard drive or it has to be a CD? And...Lets say my computer dies I took a image and saved everything I get a brand new computer with the same OS and restore from back up, would it restore it to exactly the way the way I saved the image?

GeneO · 01 Feb 2011

Josh7 said:

essenbe said:

Image software restores your entire operating system, programs and files to exactly like it was when you took the image. File and folder type backups just backup items in your libraries such as documents, photos, music.

If your hard drive dies or the OS becomes corrupted, it is much simpler to use an image and restore everything at once. Without an image you must reinstall Windows, install programs, windows settings set up email accounts, ect. If you do not have backups, you lose all of your emails, documents, photos etc.

I hope this explains the difference.

Yes, it kinda does. What does the Image save on? can you save on the back up hard drive or it has to be a CD? And...Lets say my computer dies I took a image and saved everything I get a brand new computer with the same OS and restore from back up, would it restore it to exactly the way the way I saved the image?

It saves to any device you specify, it doesn't have to be a CD. If your system disk dies you need these things to recover without a lot of pain:

1. A current image backup
2. A recovery disc (CD) to be able to restore the image backup

Otherwise you will need to fresh install your system, updates to it, and reinstall all of your software programs

Another option is to have another disk that you make a sector by sector copy (clone) of your system disk. Then, by a BIOS change, you can boot to this clone in place of the failed drive. This can be done by software such as Acronis True Image .

essenbe · 01 Feb 2011

The answer to that is yes and no. Yes it would restore the same image as it was the day you took the image. No, it probably would not work on a different computer because the image has the settings and drivers for the old computer which is probably different than the new computer. There are programs that would do that but none of the free ones that I am aware. But, if your hard drive died and you replaced the hard drive on the same computer it would do that if the hard drive was the same size or larger. It would completely restore everything.

You can save the image on an external hard drive or on DVDs. It is usually better to save it on an external. DVDs degrade and depending on the size of your backup would probably take several DVDs for one image. Most imaging programs compress the image, but depending on the size of your hard drive, the image can still be as much as 20GB or more.