External hard drives
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Looking for an external hard drive to store large amounts of data. I'm guessing a few gigs. I recall a few threads years back where people had strong opinions (yes, here on the zone, shocking) about which brand to buy. Specifically that Seagate was crap. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.
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Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: good at drinking water
WD 4TB Elements Portable
WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0
That's 4000 Gigs.
$109 @ amazon.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Zzzzzz
Ha. I don't need that many
Ha. I don't need that many gigs but good to know. Thanks!
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: I rang a silent bell
How many gigs do you need?
How many gigs do you need?
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Patrick H.
Zang have many external HD.
Zang have many external HD. Most mine are 4TB each ~about 12+ TB of data and counting so far. Have WD and Seagate HD. Had one go bad it was a WD in 5 years.
Would suggest what ever you buy you get 2 of them. Due to they will fail it is just when.
Or price of Raids have come down too. You can get smaller raids pretty cheap though you did not give a budget. Raids cost much more then 2 external HD's.
Store them in cool and well ventilated areas if you can. Cover them when not in use.
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Steve had a good suggestion with link above. You will be surprised how much data you can accumulate mostly if you take any video files.
Some nights when recording, run 8 audio channels and full lenght video I come home with 40+ GB just for that night...argg...then it has to go on 2 drives. Each 30 min video file is 4GB each at full resolution.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Zzzzzz
I probably only need about
I probably only need about 20gigs.
Thanks for the information Patrick. Maybe I'll go Steve's route. I have 2 seagates right now that have most of my old files that mostly duplicate each other.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Franklin Page
I recommend OWC drives if you
I recommend OWC drives if you have a Mac. You can format for PC. A hard drive is the last thing I would go cheap on.....
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: I rang a silent bell
Zang - you can get 64gig
Zang - you can get 64gig thumb drives for around $20. Get a couple to back each other up. Maybe an external hard drive is not what you need if you are only working with about 20gigs of data.
32 gig thumb drives are only about $10
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Dr. Benway
seconding what chinarider
seconding what chinarider says, if you really only need 20-40gb go with a thumb drive, but depending on what you intend to store it might be worth it to buy a 1 or 2 TB drive(1000-2000GB), 20GB is small now a days, and if you intend to store any music, video, or audio files a thumb drive might fill up faster than you think.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Zzzzzz
So checking on some files it
So checking on some files it looks like I'll need about 500 gigs. Who knew how much space I actually took up. So maybe I need bigger. Thanks for the opinions.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Sycamore Slough
So, from those with
So, from those with experience of a couple years, what sort of failure rates to the Solid-State drives experience?
I've only ruined one thumb drive, due to a faulty USB port on a buddy's home-built PC. It had too much voltage and fried the poor thing
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: good at drinking water
I think that after 5 years,
I think that after 5 years, 30% failure rate for large WDs. Maybe higher.
BUT they keep getting bigger and cheaper, and my archive of shows keeps growing.
I expect within a couple of months they'll sell a 5-T WD elements drive for maybe $10 more.
I'd probably spend the $10 for a decent case too, Amazon offered me cases when I bought the drives.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Strangha
I just bought an 8T Western
I just bought an 8T Western Digital for $200 at Best Buy recently. And no, not one of their EZ brand. WD.
I'm out of room and need to get my Targhee Bluegrass videos processed. I recorded much of the festival.