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Posted By: michael_d External Hard Drive Rec's - 08/31/14 03:55 PM

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.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/03/14 01:11 PM
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.
Posted By: MMM Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 01:00 AM
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.
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 10:45 AM
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.
Posted By: MMM Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 11:43 AM
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.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 01:28 PM
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?
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 04:11 PM
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.
Posted By: chesseroo Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 04:47 PM
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
Posted By: Gr8_White_North Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/04/14 07:42 PM
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
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/05/14 12:38 AM
I was checking out the Seatgate 4T, 2 bay NAS boxes and they have one they call "diskless". What's that mean?
Posted By: Gr8_White_North Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/05/14 12:44 AM
Originally Posted By: michael_d
I was checking out the Seatgate 4T, 2 bay NAS boxes and they have one they call "diskless". What's that mean?


They are using Solid State Hard Drive's SSD though I suspect that would be really expensive. Do you have a link??
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/05/14 02:20 AM
No, diskless means that it comes without any disks and you supply your own.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/05/14 04:00 PM
Oh crap.... you're right. I could have sworn the “diskless” NAS I was looking at on Amazon said 4T, but now, looking closer, you have to select the amount of storage capacity. Duhhh….

There appears to be two different Seagate models. I can’t tell the difference between the two. Any idea what the difference is between these two? Both are two bay, 4T machines. Different model numbers. They look a bit different as well.

STBN4000100
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Business-S...rds=seagate+NAS

STCT4000100
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Network-At...rds=seagate+NAS
Posted By: Gr8_White_North Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/05/14 09:16 PM
Originally Posted By: Ken.C
No, diskless means that it comes without any disks and you supply your own.


HA that one was a greyhound.
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/05/14 11:59 PM
Don't buy the one that advertises up to 100BM/s. Not unless you've got really good plumbing.
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/06/14 12:01 AM
Honestly, I'd probably go with a ReadyNAS or a Synology before the Seagate. ReadyNAS by preference, but that's because I'm pretty familiar with them.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/06/14 05:40 PM
That's NetGear, right?
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/06/14 07:16 PM
Yeah, unfortunately.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/06/14 11:31 PM
smile

Price wise, these are about a hundred bucks for than the Seagate units. Are they more stable / reliable?
Posted By: Ken.C Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/07/14 12:01 AM
I don't know anything about the Seagate units, but they are pretty reliable and stable. Of course, you'll get drive failures with anything.
Posted By: MMM Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/07/14 03:21 AM
I went with Synology. The reason was that they have one of the best user interface out there.

But sadly, to get a synology, you have to pay for it. I have had a USB and a Firewire hooked up drive. but the fatal flaw with them is:

1. they are only hooked up to one machine and only work when they are hooked up.
2. they tend to be proprietary in the way they work that locks you into their solution
3. was a single point of failure as there was no redundancy within it's solution.
4. look at point #1 again.

The reason I went NAS was that it's just there. it allows for me to forget it was there and automate a backup function so it worked without me needing to remember to do something. I wanted something that will give me the solution beyond just what I needed now but could also do the level that I could grow into. I wanted stability and expandability that was not tied into a propriety package.

if I was going with a USB solution, I WOULD NOT get a plug in drive case.. buy something like this:

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=14_679&item_id=068681

what do you need a case for.. it's just extra packaging. You need a dock that a hard drive plugs into to put the data onto the drive. full stop.

But it only works when you remember to back up your data, and there is ZERO drive redundancy. it's just a point in time backup that is a second copy.

Once you put in a Mirror (RAID 1) then when you copy to that drive, the backup is sort of backed up to cover you for disk failure. But that only covers the side of hardware fault. If you need to hook up a drive to backup, then you still have the human error of forgetfullness to deal with. It its always there, then you can automate so that your computer wakes up by itself and backs up without you needing to do anything.

Just something to think about.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/07/14 04:56 PM
Thanks Guys!

Matt - I was following you, up till the last paragraph. I am a computer idiot.

I am sold on the NAS solution however. I just need to figure out which magic box to buy. I think 4T is about all I need.

I work from both my office PC and my laptop. Having a networked drive is very handy, when it works anyway. I use my laptop for tuning vehicles, calibrating my video equipment and other things that don't tie me to the office.
Posted By: MMM Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/08/14 04:06 AM
The beauty of most NAS solutions are that they BOX is independent to the choice of the drives you put in that box. So, you make the choice of the size of NAS by two factors.. How many drives you want to put into the unit, and how big those drives are.

A single drive is just the size of the drive minus any overhead for the NAS O/S.

But what if you want larger and don't want to buy a really big capacity drive. Then you get into RAID. (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) What this can do for you is either expand the capacity of the drives, give you drive failure redundancy or both. Depending on how many drives you have, RAID can give you many options.

With 2 drives, you have either RAID 0 or 1.

Raid 0 is striping where part of files are written to one drive and another part to the other. You get the capacity of both drives added together and a bump in drive performance, but with a risk. if either of the drives dies you loose everything as there is NO fault tolerance.

Raid 1 is drive mirroring. Where whatever is written to the first drive is automatically done on the second. You only have the capacity of a single drive, but if one of the drives fails (hardware failure) you don't loose any data. In such a case you can replace the failed drive and the RAID will re-copy all the data onto the new drive to restore the fault protection. You can use this method to also increase the size of your drives buy replacing one of you drives with a larger new drive and having it rebuild then replace the other.

If you have 3 or more drives then you can go RAID 5, that takes the idea of raid 0, but adds in fault tolerance buy writing a parity block. In raid 5 your capacity is (n-1) where n is the number of disks you have.. so for example I have a 4 disk raid 5 with 3tb drives. So I have (4-1)x3tb=9tb of drive space. If one of the 4 drives fails (hardware) the parity block can be used to figure out missing data from the failed disk.

The only thing that you must remember is that RAID fault tolerance only covers you for hardware faults. If you have a RAID 1 and you delete a file off your NAS, it would delete the files off both drives. If your computer barfs while writing to the NAS and the files is written corrupted, then it would be written corrupted to both drives. RAID is not the same as duplicate backups. So dont think of a RAID solution as well I have a backup of that as I have two drives in my NAS.

I have 3 NAS units. One NAS is my main drive where I store all my Media, Documents, Photo's, CD Rips... Then the other two NAS units backup the really important stuff that is on the first NAS. As the data is really stored in 3 different places, I have backups. Also, each of the NAS units have fault tolerance so the data saves on them has hardware failure protection as well.

I also have a SATA dock hooked up to the first nas where I will periodically backup all my important data for archive and take it off site (to my parents house) so that just in case of a fire/fload/breakin my important data is protected.

I looked at it as the cost of trying to re-produce my work would be multiple factors more expensive than the cost of hardware that went into this solution. But it's been bought over a 3-4 year period.
Posted By: michael_d Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/08/14 01:30 PM
Wow, thanks! Great explanation! I have a 2T hard drive on the main computer. I have less than 1T on it now. But, I do not mess with any HD videos, yet. I suspect I may get into that eventually.

You have 3 NAS boxes? Are they for just personal stuff, or do you run a business out of your home too? Just curious.
Posted By: MMM Re: External Hard Drive Rec's - 09/08/14 10:42 PM
I really just use them for personal stuff.

I have close to 1.3tb of music files (CD rip in Flac) I have quite a bit of movies and PVR tv shows that I watch.

I also store all my DSLR camera raw files along with the processing images, .PS files etc..

My first NAS was a cheep Dlink unit (that I still have but don't use). it was junk and learnt me that you get what you pay for. You can make your own NAS pretty easily but you sort of need to know what you are doing and get ZERO support.

I went with Snyology as the forum was pretty good. The user interface was the best out there and it's geared towards a higher end home user.

I started off with a 2bay, then got a second 2bay then this past year picked up the 4bay.
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