External drives - what to get?
Moderator: Thanas
External drives - what to get?
Im looking for external disks for my job. Needed to back up important data so high reliability is a must. What is worthy of attention if I want to get the best bang for the buck? FireWire connectivity is welcome, but not essential. I was thinking about 2 1TB drives or 1 2TB drive. If the price is good I might go for 2 2TB drives.
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Marcus Aurelius
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Re: External drives - what to get?
There are so many options that it's difficult to give any spesific recommendations. If reliability is the key, I would recommend a mirrored (RAID 1) external drive. The downside is that they are much more expensive than single drive units.Tolya wrote:Im looking for external disks for my job. Needed to back up important data so high reliability is a must. What is worthy of attention if I want to get the best bang for the buck? FireWire connectivity is welcome, but not essential. I was thinking about 2 1TB drives or 1 2TB drive. If the price is good I might go for 2 2TB drives.
For a single drive external disk I would recommend one with a build-in fan despite the inevitable noise. There are some good passive cooling solutions out there, but active cooling is still much easier to design and implement making it a safer bet in most cases. Of course fans can fail, in which case use of the drive should be stopped immediately.
Nevertheless you probably should use a backup drive only when you do the backups and disconnect it for the rest of the time. If you do daily backups that might not be feasible, however, in which case a RAID 1 unit is a very good idea.