Hard drive prices - and innovation - decline

Night Hawk said:

I didn't think you could have too much backup while you may use up a lot of drive space or removable media at times. Hard drives never failing? HAR! That's a joke! You can have a brand new as well as old clunker drive decide to give you a major headache!

Last year, I bought a new desktop USB 1.5TB HDD (to use for backups) and it was broken.

The retailer replaced it when I took it back (2 days later). :)

I have 3 main desktop backup HDDs (plus two small portable HDDs) totalling ~5.5TB.
I also have a 2TB internal backup HDD in my PC.

Unfortunately I don't have any off-site storage.

Backup HDD images are also useful for testing new software programs (if you don't have a VM & VM manager).

Even after testing a program in a VM and deciding to install it on your physical machine, you may only use a program a few times, or you may discover it doesn't actually provide the benefits you first thought.

Re-imaging your PC means that there aren't any leftover bits clogging up your install.

Nowadays, I always create a backup before installing driver updates.
Driver installs/updates are infamous for causing havoc.

There are literally "countless" reasons for having extra drives as well as other alternatives for backups. When going to plan out this case I had taken a drive out of the WD Essentials usb enclosure it came in and installed it internally as an extra drive for testing 7. Unfortunately any OS installed would go on but have constant issues with any program you installed!

That drive was designated for storage only back then and still sits in the old case having a full image for the Vista install first seen when replacing board, cpu, memory, and supply as both board and supply failed! Well you know a clean install had to be seen for Vista on the old main drive that wore out and was then replaced where the image restoration seemed to all go well until the new drive had an oops and still no explaination as to why the fresh install of Vista or XP at first would finish by dvd or flash drive install key for Vista or by way of cd for XP. My friend who I had set the old case up for was able to get XP on and then suddenly after only a few days "no boot device detected"!

The first drive was the main drive since that case was first new in late 2007 having seen a ton of wear and hard boots at times when first getting used to the previous version as well as testing 7! It lasted however. And then you would think? a brand new drive installed internally with adequate cooling not an external which often suffers from much higher temps failed in less then a month?

As for getting into those larger drives I first knew when going to plan out this build that a move up from a pair of 500gb OS drives as well as the extra Green Power 500 used for storage would need to be replaced by two larger 1tb OS dirves as well as now trying out a pair of Sata III drives becoming available. At first 7 went onto the S3 drive used for the main until a problem requiring a clean install came up a few times like a supply cooking a new board or changing the brand of memory used(OCZ 1.9v to Muskin 1.5v) and yet saw no problem later after the first year and a full image made and restored even six months later when again changing the memory(Mushkin Enhanced dimms sitting too high for original hsf only allowing two not four dimms to Kinston Hyper X with low profile regular height dimms) which had passed the grace period for hardware updates.

By the time last summer came along you knew it was time for a clean install knowing the system had been run since the initial image had been restored in October 2010 until then! That shows a good image can last and why that type of backup can have several advantages.

The problem comes when those one or more images just happen to be larger in size where a tb drive is cramped! One folder coming in at 358gb is also one reason why the OS drive is also a 1tb not smaller. Now imagine having several images to keep. Where are you going to put them?

The idea of swapping out the 1tbs for a pair of S3 2tbs came to mind as well as adding in one or two more drives internally for immediate access as well as for keeping images. Other backups as well as copy & paste and downloading something more then once to go to the main drive as well as a folder on each of the two storage drives insure one will be a good download in case one or two don't work out.

You backup the download as well as everything else at times not only in case of some hardware issue but software problem of some type. That would apply to why an image made is the day saved if something goes wrong with any update or new program install.