Re: External Hard Drives
In news:eYb2b6KlKHA.3476@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl,
David C. Holley <David.C.Holley> typed:
> Ideally, I'd like a large enough HD that serves as a backup to my
> laptop and separately stores images. The laptop (a Dell) is a 80GB
> that's around 40GB at this point. I'm [NOT] looking for anything
> portable or that'll fit in my pocket.
In my own experience:
500 Gig, even 1 Terabyte prices have come way down lately, along with 360Gig
and 250 Gig especially. 500 would probably do you nicely, and keep a fairly
large history of backups plus allow the storage of some important system
discs, if that's what you want. Then again if you only want one or two
backups kept at a time, something in the order of 250 Meg might suffice, but
.... it could get tight fairly quickly. 360 Gig would be a better minimum
IMO. But if you go for the Terabyte, then you have provided for the future
when you'll very likely be adding larger and more drives to your system,
depending on how much data you create, etc..
Personally I use two external terabyte drives, and alternate them from month
to month. That way if one is ever compromised badly or goes belly up, I
still have the other one with only slightly older data on it. The idea is to
keep one completely disconnected at all times, in my case, so viruses,
electrical problems, etc., can't get at it.
Terabytes might sound like overkill, but it's not; I'm backing up 5 drive
letters and a lot of data plus the OS whenever anything gets installed or
uninstalled; around 18 Gig total goes into a Full backup, the rest are
incrementals.
I got into 2 externals because the one WD external I had went belly up;
the drive itself became completely unable to spin up to proper speed. Never
did get all the data replaced, but thanks to the occasional DVD backups and
the other drive, it wasn't a large loss. I'm not near so lazy about
creating DVD copies for permanent backups since then<g>. But use RW types
for DVDs; it's a lot cheaper in the long run<g>!
HTH,
Twayne
>
>
>
> "Daave" <daave@example.com> wrote in message
> news:eanVyKGlKHA.1824@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>> David C. Holley wrote:
>>> Can anyone recommend any external hard drives?
>>>
>>> (or a more appropirate newsgroup)
>>
>> What are your specific needs?
>>
>> Do you want something portable that you can fit in your pocket?
>>
>> Or do you want something less portable that will almost always be
>> close to your PC?
>>
>> What will this drive be used for? Backing up data and/or storing
>> images of your PC's hard drive? Or an actual *clone* of your PC's
>> hard drive? What is the make an model of your PC and/or motherboard? And
>> most
>> important, does it have any eSATA ports?
>>
>> (Since the hardware newsgroup is more appropriate, this part of your
>> thread will now be cross-posted to it.)