What External Hard Drives do You All Use?

I have many, mostly seagate, maxtor .. .but i always buy the housing, and the drive seperately.

the only exception is my latest tiny buffalo:
http://www.buffalotech.com/products...on-turbousb-portable-hard-drive-hd-ps-series/

really a neat little thingy.

my advice, do not use the same type of drive, the same year of production and
same vendor for your data drives and your backup drives. this reduces the risk of your backup dive failing the same day as your primary data drive.

never store data on just one drive :D
 
my advice, do not use the same type of drive, the same year of production and same vendor for your data drives and your backup drives. this reduces the risk of your backup dive failing the same day as your primary data drive.

Funny you should mention that because virtually all of the RAID systems I've seen have drives of exactly the same model, batch, and date of manufacture. Sometimes up to 16 drives in one RAID unit.

And yes, when we have a single drive in a raid system go down we'll often find another two or three drives in the same raid will also fail within in a matter of days or weeks.
 
Funny you should mention that because virtually all of the RAID systems I've seen have drives of exactly the same model, batch, and date of manufacture. Sometimes up to 16 drives in one RAID unit.

And yes, when we have a single drive in a raid system go down we'll often find another two or three drives in the same raid will also fail within in a matter of days or weeks.

yes, this is the way it often happens. For that reason my personal system looks different in the respect ;) Been doing it for over a decade now, never lost any data (except once when i was travelling with a dying laptop and had no backup drive with me).
 
D'you think that the buffalo ministation would be rugged enough for a month of hard backpacking (dust, bumpy roads in Africa) or would seagate be a safer choice?
 
D'you think that the buffalo ministation would be rugged enough for a month of hard backpacking (dust, bumpy roads in Africa) or would seagate be a safer choice?

the bumpy roads do not do too much harm as long as the drives are switched off. and as they are encapsulated, dust should not be a problem either. But still a HDD is mechanical, and thus I would not suggest it for heavy backpacking, I would also not advise taking a laptop with you.

For reasons of data safety I would advise to take lots of CF cards with you instead. the 16 GB ones are affordable these days, and with some of them you should be fine for lots of images, even in RAW. Also bring lots of batteries, as charging might be a problem (depending on where you are: no electricity, electricity at certain hours only, total breakdowns for days).
 
Two very interesting things were mentioned: NAS, and eSATA. If one of those works for you, I'd make it my first choice. NAS is nice, because it shows up on any computer on the network, but be wary of Iomega ones (I had one fail after 2 months, and used a propriatary connection program that needed to be run each boot. I wrote an AHK script to do it, but still)

eSATA is brilliant. It treats the drive just like an internal, so it runs a very high speed, but is still hot-swappable. It also let's SMART do its job to let you know when to worry (I've never had a SMART capable HD fail without warning, and I have gone through A LOT of hard drives). I use a large eSATA hard drive for my Media PC< and it can easily handle recording 2 HD shows, 2 SD shows, and playback at the same time (though the computer itself struggles a bit)
 
Two Lacie (Firewire 800)
One Lacie Rugged portable (USB2.0/Firewire800/400) that travels with laptop
Two Acomdata (Firewire 400)
One SATA dock from thermaltake with a bunch of 80gb SATA hotpulls (USB 2.0)
 
I've had a WD 120 gb for 3 years, it still works fine. I also have a LaCie 250gb.
 
I see now there is a newer interface for internal drives, PATA, the cables look just like EIDE .
 
From what I've read, I've been rather lucky with my Maxtor 300GB external firewire drive. I use macs and have read that the enclosure should use something called the Oxford chipset.

So, therefore, to back up my backup, I purchased separately an internal hard drive and an enclosure.

Here are the links.

Western Digital drive from Newegg.

And Wiebetech enclosure.
 
thanks for the advice Alex! Phew, so glad I've started stocking up on CF cards & batteries.
 
When off at football tournaments with my son's team, I use an old FlashTrax hard drive to which to copy my CF cards and reuse for the next games.

It's rather old and clunky, with an LCD screen just adequate to know that I successfully copied the images.

What are folks' experiences with the Epson P-3000 or P-5000, or some other portable drives?
 
30gig iPod Video.
 

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