What is the most reliable external HD?

If your case can support the number of drives you'll need, then you can use a card such as

http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=RAID%20HBAs&product_id=124

and add the requisite drives. Also this presumes that your power and cooling systems are up to it in your existing system.

I built a system with a software based Raid 5 array on the motherboard and it is slllloooowwww. I would not recommend it. There are bunches of other boards that will do the job. Here's a review of them:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raid505&page=1

Good Luck,
Shad

Louie Escober said:

http://www.4tress.com/

Click to expand...

Vastly Overpriced. So much so that i wonder if it's a joke. $899 for a 100gig drive? You can buy 5 or 6 100gig external hard drives from any other manufacturer for that, and Given that there are really only a few companies that ACTUALLY make hard drives, I'd guess that the drive inside that case is a standard off the shelf drive. Actually I think they use Maxtor drives because the spec sheet says they had Fluid Dynamic Bearings. That's a term used in Maxtor's Marketing materials. Since Maxtor are the cheapest drives, you're getting screwed even harder than the high price indicates.
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Chris

All my pictures are stored in duplicate, on two seagate 200gb drives. A third copy is burned into dvd and stored in my office at work.

I save all my photoshop edits the same way.

That way, if I lose a drive, I don't have to go back and photoshop 1000 to 5000 pictures.

Yes I have to agree with this statement regaring IBM, most notebally Dekstars which of course would be the consumer end of the market.

Please omit them from my list as I recall having been sent a letter notifing me (as an owner of 2 IBM's) of a class action suit against IBM. Basically it entails the fact that they are having problems with the Dekstar series(or models within this line) HDD's, the real problem is that they kept on , or are still manufacturing them with a "known" defect. I will have to scrounge that letter up.

Best regards,
Tom
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http://www.photosbytom.com/gallery/

ICQ#36762366

I have been struggling with exactly this topic for a while - how to store, protect, and back up my data. I used to be on tapes and although it makes perfect sense to change them out nightly, I found it wasn't happening.

So, I big issue for me has been coming up with a solution that I know I can implement. This is what I am thinking about putting in place and I would love any feedback. I currently have 1 western digital 120 gb external hard drive gthat is max'd out. I am currently running on both xp and osx. I was perviously on xp and am slowly making the switch to osx. I am on a powerbookG4 with the next computer purchase planned as a
g5 tower. Anyway,

I am looking at buying 2 matching external hard drives. I am thinking about (2) iomega 400gb black series external hard drives. I am going to use one of them as a primary drive - meaning that I will work directly off of it and save to it for all of my photos. I will then use synchronize! to run a backup copy of those files nightly to the 2nd external hard drive. Their back ups are not compressed, they just copy the files. The software will also keep archived copies of the files for a specified period of time. Therefore, if drive 1 fails you have a working copy of everything on drive 2. If you find you have deleted the wrong file or written over the file 2 days ago, you have an archived copy. As well, there are some files that I would want on my laptop such as things I would want to show clients, etc.... Those files can be synchronized with directories in the external hard drive so that they stay current - synchronized, not backed-up - so what is changed on the laptop hard drive is then changed on the external.

This, of course, does not address work flow. For that, after/during, every shoot I download the files to the laptop and immediately write the files to a cd/dvd. I write 2 copies so one stays on site and the other goes with my wife to her work. She keeps a huge stack of them there. Then once I edit files, photoshop, etc.... and am done, I make a final cd (2 copies - one off site).

For me, this sounds like a good procedure. Everything is automated except for the writing of cd's which just needs to be done. Over the last 2 years I have had 2 hard drives fail multiple times. One was from hardware, the other was multiple software fails - they never did figure out the reason. And going through compressed backups, splitting the raid configuration to rebuild a drive, copying hard drives to save material and then reloading operating systems is just too much of a pain. I figure in this system, my work is archived on cd's. The working current data is on 2 identical external hard drives (the 2nd drive being updated nightly) when one fails you go to the next and replace it. If the computer fails I just plug the external hard drives into another computer and send it off to apple.

It is interesting. People have been talking about how long their drives have lasted, etc.... I do agree with one of the comments that we should just assume failure. The other is a rule a computer engineer friend of mine uses. She writes financial trading software. Her assumption is that a personal computer should be replaced every 4 years. A computer for business should be replaced every 2 years. Off of that, I have built thoses costs into my assumed yearly costs.

I know that this is a long post. But, does anyone see any problems with what I have outlined? And, what do people think of the black series iomega drives? I was thinking about lacie drives but their bigger and biggest series have gotten some negative feedback and I would really like a drive that is at least 300 gb. I just see myself maxing out a 250 gb drive too quickly.

Thanks for any input and for reading this post all the way through. Cheers,
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rob jillson

I'm an avid amateur photographer and peruse these forums for useful information but your comments regarding the Fortress drive urged me to write a post.

I own a Fortress drive so let me explain why this drive is no joke - as you implied. I was introduced to the Fortress drive through my work. I'm employed in procurement by an engineering design company and we had a military project where field collected data had to be stored on a portable/removable hard drive. The problem was that the equipment the drive was to be attached to was going to be subjected to harsh shock and vibration as well as elevated ambient temperatures. To save costs our engineers initially tried numerous off the shelf external hard drives such as the Maxtor One-Touch drive and equivalent units from other manufacturers. These are the inexpensive drives you alluded to in your post; all 3.5" format drives. None of them could tolerate the harsh operating environment demands of this project. In fact they all failed and the data was lost when subjected to even low-level shock and vibration.

Next the engineers tried off the shelf 2.5" format drives from manufacturers such as Iomega, La Cie etc. Although more tolerant of the harsh operating conditions they again failed. Thus it was decided a mil-spec drive was necessary and so the Fortress and the Olixir models were purchased and tested. The Olixir was better than the previously tested 2.5" drives but not by much whereas the Fortress drive easily passed all of our testing without exhibiting any problems at all and consequently I bought one since I don’t wish to risk losing my data. The drive is an impressive piece of equipment and if you saw one in the flesh you'd appreciate and understand why it sets itself apart from all other drives and commands a premium price. It's the same old adage, “you get what you pay for”.
By the way, most all drives use Fluid Dynamic Bearings.
Joe.

I've not checked in a long time, but I believe XP Pro will let you do 'software' RAID0/1/5. That may only be a server software function though.

There are lots of other RAID options out there that aren't the $800 RAID card you find at work.

Adaptec has the best inexpensive line that I've found, but based on my experience with an Adaptec 2400A (it doesn't tell you when something goes wrong, so I lost data when the 2nd of four drives failed) I can't recommend them.

If you just want to do RAID 0/1 there are many Highpoint or other cards out there like this: http://www.buslink.com/p_PCI2S.shtml that are easily picked up for $20 or so.

It seems once you get into the performance area at all though they go from $20 - 50 to $300 rather fast.
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http://public.fotki.com/trekkie

AndyEllen said:

I'm trying to protect my pictures by having a large external HD. I
need reliability, quietness, and good backup software. Any
suggestion?

Click to expand...

Andy,

I use Maxtor One Touch. I currently have three and none have failed.

Lowell

We are using Adaptec 2410SA controllers with SATA drives in our servers. These allow Raid 0, 1, or 5, and are fairly transparent to the OS. These cards can be configured to email you when there's a problem.

We did have one near-dataloss incident; we had a drive fail, and while rebuilding the RAID 5 array a second drive had an error. This trashed the array. We were able to restore from a backup with no data loss.

Adaptec would say that we should have created one large array and partitioned with the OS. We did the opposite, and partitioned with the raid controller. In our case the array with the OS was good and the data array had the second drive failure. Adaptec indicated that it is possible to fool the system into making the failed drive look good (assumption was that failure was probably not in the actual data). This would have allowed recovery of data. They considered our approach (replace second drive and restore) to be the more complete solution, actually.

The failed drives were Seagate 200Gb SATA drives; unusual to have two fail at once since Seagate drives are usually considered top notch.

The second failed drive was only indicated in the BIOS utilities; there was no way to find out from the operating system which drive had failed. We started off assuming that the replacement drive had failed but found out differently when we looked in the card bios.

Tom Boucher said:

Adaptec has the best inexpensive line that I've found, but based on
my experience with an Adaptec 2400A (it doesn't tell you when
something goes wrong, so I lost data when the 2nd of four drives
failed) I can't recommend them.

Click to expand...

I'm now at 42 years in the computer industry with hands-on hardware experience all through. (Now retired but still busy as ever on PCs).

Apart from faulty design and manufacture that appears from time to time in device models or individual devices on the production line, the biggest enemy is heat.

Keep things cool or at reasonable temperatures and long term reliabilty is good. If a fan jams or runs slow, things start to get unreliable and even when the fan is fixed, often failures keep on happening due to that heat stress period. Been there, done that, seen it happen many many times over those 42 years.

So to modern PCs, run it for an hour or so, open the case and feel the hard drive(s). If too hot to hold your hand on then add fans. Anyway, you need to open PC cases at least once a year to get the dust out of the fans and heat sinks, sensibly aimed compressed air is good but messy. I tend to always unpeel the fan labels and put one drop of sewing machine oil in the fan bearing at this time. Especially those video cards with stupidly small fans on them that are guaranteed to fail in a year or so.

I now always build PCs with at least one fan mounted so it will circulate air over the hard drive. It doesn't necessarily provide cool air as such, but stops hot spot buildup by keeping all the air moving within the case and over the drive(s). Also add as many fans as possible that blow air into the case, just relying on the power supply fan to suck out air doesn't give enough movement within the case and those nasty hotspots occur.

If fan noise is a problem then I solder a 47 ohm (or nearabouts) resistor into the fan lead to make it rotate a little slower. With enough slow quiet fans the air does move around OK and nothing gets fried. My wife's PC now has 8 fans inside aimed at potential hot spots it and is quieter than an off the shelf PC with only a couple of fans. My own bigger faster PC only has a paltry 5 fans in it, I must attend to that.

Touch wood of course, but due to that "fans everywhere" policy I do have good reliability.

Regards............. Guy