Backup Drive

C

chinook

I'm planning to buy a second hard drive as a backup drive. This is mainly for protection against hard drive crashes. I'm thinking about Western Digital 80GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive. It's about $115 with shipping at newegg.com. I need to get a USB 2.0 PCI card too-- it's only about $10-12.

Is anyone using USB 2.0 external drives--any comments?

Thanks,

Chinook
 
Why not just use a second internal hard drive? Unless you have a second computer you may want to move data to, it is faster to use an internal drive and they are usually cheaper.
 
Quote from chinook:

I'm planning to buy a second hard drive as a backup drive. This is mainly for protection against hard drive crashes. I'm thinking about Western Digital 80GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive. It's about $115 with shipping at newegg.com. I need to get a USB 2.0 PCI card too-- it's only about $10-12.

Is anyone using USB 2.0 external drives--any comments?

Thanks,

Chinook
More...

I use 2.0 USB slim box setups. They allow me to backup, switch or tap into other computers at my leisure through the USB connections. The slim boxes cost $14 (eBay). I populated my main data backup slim box with a six gig drive that cost me $35 (eBay also).

So for about $50 I have the best of both worlds. I even have one with a sixty gig drive ($175) that I use for parties with my music collection as well as some higher end games to keep my laptop drive as open as possible. I'd recommend this setup anywhere :)
 
Quote from pspr:

Why not just use a second internal hard drive? Unless you have a second computer you may want to move data to, it is faster to use an internal drive and they are usually cheaper.
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pspr,

I'd like to be able to have immediate access to the data if something happens to the PC including getting stolen. Also, eventually, I'll get a second PC so this way moving data around will be easier.

Chinook
 
Chinook, you might also consider an internal drive in a mobile rack (removable drive bay). Thats what I went with for multiple PCs. In a mobile rack, the drives are easily moved from PC to PC, or removed entirely for security (great for backup/image data). A Google search for "mobile rack", "removable drive bay", "removable rack", etc. will return a lot of info. Here's one link: http://www.cruinc.com/htmldocs/products/dataport.htm

I know Newegg carries Kingwin mobile racks, and maybe others. Directron carries a few different brands: http://www.directron.com/mobilerack.html
 
Quote from chinook:

I'm planning to buy a second hard drive as a backup drive. This is mainly for protection against hard drive crashes. I'm thinking about Western Digital 80GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive. It's about $115 with shipping at newegg.com. I need to get a USB 2.0 PCI card too-- it's only about $10-12.

Is anyone using USB 2.0 external drives--any comments?

Thanks,

Chinook
More...
A good way to do this is to have four drives and do a Raid 0+1. You can do this today with SATA or even IDE drives with the right controller.

If you really want to do it right, get a SCSI controller with dual channels and a MB and computer case that supports hot swap drive bays. Arrange the drives so that they end up on different controllers - not only will that will increase your R/W performance, it will also give you extra fault tolerance from a controller failure or a drive failure, all without having to bring your computer down.

I do this with a hardware SCSI controller that is onboard on the motherboard with some inexpensive LVD SCSI drives that I bought for about $250 (for four drives that I picked up cheaply.) I then do software RAID from Windows 2000. You can also just buy a MB with a RAID controlller, but those motherboards are quite a bit more than non RAID motherboards, or you have to shell out some cash for a RAID PCI card.

If you just want to back up _data_ to removable media, there are many ways to do it...External USB is good, but I do not like external drives unless I can boot from them. Many of the older computer's BIOS will not allow you to boot from USB... :(

nitro
 
Quote from nitro:


A good way to do this is to have four drives and do a Raid 0+1. You can do this today with SATA or even IDE drives with the right controller.

If you really want to do it right, get a SCSI controller with dual channels and a MB and computer case that supports hot swap drive bays. Arrange the drives so that they end up on different controllers - not only will that will increase your R/W performance, it will also give you extra fault tolerance from a controller failure or a drive failure, all without having to bring your computer down.

I do this with a hardware SCSI controller that is onboard on the motherboard with some inexpensive LVD SCSI drives that I bought for about $250 (for four drives that I picked up cheaply.) I then do software RAID from Windows 2000. You can also just buy a MB with a RAID controlller, but those motherboards are quite a bit more than non RAID motherboards, or you have to shell out some cash for a RAID PCI card.

If you just want to back up _data_ to removable media, there are many ways to do it...External USB is good, but I do not like external drives unless I can boot from them. Many of the older computer's BIOS will not allow you to boot from USB... :(

nitro
More...

Hi nitro,

You probably run Windows 2000 Server. Can you do software raid on Workstation?

Be good,

nonosense
 
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