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External Hard Drive Rec's
#406918 08/31/14 03:55 PM
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It looks as if my trusty, old faithful Seagate Free Agent hard drive has died. That thing has been completely issue free. Always worked, never any sort of problem whatsoever. I think I've had it for about five years. Now my PC doesn't even recognize it, and it's lit up all the time (it lights up whenever it is woke up to be used). This drive is where I keep my photo's backed up, and nothing else, just my RAW backups from Lightroom. Bummer.....I really like this drive. It's a 750G, and has about 700G on it, so I was about to buy another one anyway.

Might you all have any recommendations for a new drive? I'm thinking I better get 2T this time. I really don't want to put anything on it but photos.

Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406952 09/03/14 01:11 PM
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Hu....figured this one would be easy for a bunch of computer geeks and IT folks.

So what's up with this USB 3 that all the drives have? I had no idea there was a new standard for USB. Wiki says you can't plug a usb 3 connector into a usb 2 port, but you can plug a usb 2 plug into a usb 3 port. This computer I have has usb 2 ports.

What happened to firewire? That's the connection that my old hard drive uses.

Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406969 09/04/14 01:00 AM
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I spent a bit more money and put the drive on the network. Went with a Synology so that the drives are totally independant of the unit. I started off with a 2 drive NAS so that I could do drive mirroring so as to not potentially loose any data from drive failure.

I now have two 2 drive units, and one 4 drive unit. Have all my media, music, video and photo's on the 4 drive in RAID, and have the 2 drive units used for full system backups of all the family computers.


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Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406976 09/04/14 10:45 AM
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USB3 is another rev of USB. You can use a USB3 drive with a USB2 computer.

External drives are commodity; there's really very little difference between them at this point as far as I'm concerned.

Firewire just sort of fell by the wayside. There's still some drives available with it, but it's not used very much any more.


I am the Doctor, and THIS... is my SPOON!
Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406978 09/04/14 11:43 AM
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BTW. dont throw out the seagate drive. what usually fails on those is the controller (usb or firewire) and not the actual drive.

if you break the case open you can pull the SATA drive out and connect it directly to your computer and get the info saved on it off.


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Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406980 09/04/14 01:28 PM
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I'll try tearing into it Matt, thanks.

I do have a wired (cat 5) network in the house. I was using one of those HP media servers, but it kind of died about a year ago.

So when you say two drive NAS, is that one NAS with two drives in it?

Thanks Ken. I wasn't sure about the USB 3 physically fitting into a USB 2 port. I thought they were bigger. So if firewire is no longer used, is it very difficult to swap out a USB 2 port with a USB 3 port? Or maybe swap out the fire wire port with the USB 3 port?

Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406991 09/04/14 04:11 PM
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It is possible to get USB3 cards. They're not really worth it for external hard drives, though. You're not going to actually get any speed increase.


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Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #406996 09/04/14 04:47 PM
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I bought some 1GB WD "My Passport" external drives for backups over a year ago.
Speed is good and decent price. It did come with some software that could be useful to some people. Quiet. No hiccups.
I'm using one of them as a USB plugin PVR on my Bellsat receiver.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=218&lang=en

Last edited by chesseroo; 09/04/14 04:48 PM.

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Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #407000 09/04/14 07:42 PM
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I am not sure if this idea is up your alley but what I did was buy some external HD case's off ebay for around $10 and put my own drives in. I have one that is hooked to my dvr and it runs 24/7 and is at least 2yrs old. I have 2 others as well and they are still working great.
Richard


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Re: External Hard Drive Rec's
michael_d #407012 09/05/14 12:38 AM
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I was checking out the Seatgate 4T, 2 bay NAS boxes and they have one they call "diskless". What's that mean?

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