masseur
Joined: Jan 03, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: Sydney, London
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I've had the WD mybooks and never had a problem. The first was the 500gb which my son inherited when I got the 1tb last year. I'm now looking at the 4tb NAS version which contains 2x2tb drives but the decision is harder as there is a good choice of NAS units with raid, but as I probably won't use raid 1 (mirroring) but instead would use striping for maximum capacity and performance (though no redundancy). Drobo is another choice though that seems fairly costly even before you add drives
edit: but to answer the questions:-
1) I believe its much of a muchness. Most brands have a variable failure rate so if your data is important its worth having another drive to backup the really important and irreplaceable stuff to
2) You should be aware of Parkinsons Law that states "Data expands to fill the space available for storage". So get the biggest you can afford right now!
3) Yes, all our plug and play these days. Some come with extra software that give value added features, but I almost never use these extras
4) in my experience you can't go too far wrong with ebuyer or amazon, but dabs is ok too
5) I have heard that external drive failures very often occur when leaving external drives connected to pc's during regular shutdown and startups so its worth taking the time to click the system tray icon to "safely remove hardware" and then disconnect the drive before shutting down. Also remember the point I raised about backing up the external drive and don't believe that it is infalable to failure
[ This Message was edited by: masseur on 2009-10-17 21:13 ] |
Posted: 2009-10-17 22:00
