Recommend an external drive

[Gunn]

Thanks so much for the info. Now I must decide on feeding the HHD/enclosure with a Sata cable or Firewire or USB2! USB/Firewire would be easier but would they be fast enough even for archiving?

What are you folks using?

JoJo

[Ingwe]

I have been doing fair amount of work for satilite broadcasters at the station and my place we use 500gig Seagate with NCQ sata2 harddrives and coolermaster exturnal cases/ with esata/usb2 , I have tried other brands, but they just dont work you get overheating .just my 2cents.

[vienna1944er]

archiving will always be risky

Other (additional) step to to reduce the risk:

a) Do not buy a completing final-combination from case+drive ..... the drives\controller most scrap fom the past...

b) buy a external eSATA+USB 2.0 case with fan, and additional removable disk-Carrier
and from a good quality "brand-name" .... i.e. "raidsonic" or similar companys >> example

c) the savest disk will you (imho) find :

c1) on the Seagate-half from the drives-world >> named >Server & Enterprise Storage > Barracuda® ES >> example
MTBF = 1,200,000 hours ....7200-RPM hard drive for 24 x 7, ....5-year warranty
Transfer Rate: Maximum Sustained 105 (MB/s)

c2) on the Western-Digital-half from the drives-world > named Enterprise Class < RE2 -Serie >> example
5-year limited warranty ....1.2 million hours MTBF ....24x7 Reliability
Transfer Rate (Buffer To Disk) 98 MB/s (Sustained )

all other as WD or Seagate is for consumer-toy's..... or people the love risk....

just my personally opinion, excuse my "giberish" english .... old vienna-Hans

[Blast1]

The easiest way is to buy SATA desktop drives and eSATA external enclosures, that way you know what drive is going into the system.

[Deane Johnson]

I will be backing up and archiving on an external eSata drive ( they seem to be very cheap). Having had drives to crash over the years, I am paranoid! Can anyone recommend a good brand?

JoJo Gunn

JoJo, I primarily do family stuff that I want to be safe for years to come. As a result, I put everything in duplicate on two external drives, sort of a manual Raid approach. This works out OK for me since I don't want to spend the money for a nice external Raid system, and time is not an issue.

I first used Lacie 500 Gig drives, but have had virtually every one of them go bad. I noticed that every drive I have ever had that has gone bad has been something other than a Western Digital, and that my Western Digitals all continue to work. As a result, I'm now using the external Western Digital Notebook drives that are pretty inexpensive. I happen to be using USB connections, but I believe they also have eSata.

I haven't heard how these are holding up, but you can put together some nice combinations with them.

http://store.sansdigital-shop.com/ms2ut.html

[Aristotelis]

Using an external drive for archiving will always be risky...To reduce the risk you can buy an external RAID1 enclosure...

[Gunn]

I will be backing up and archiving on an external eSata drive ( they seem to be very cheap). Having had drives to crash over the years, I am paranoid! Can anyone recommend a good brand?

JoJo Gunn