Can you rec. a hight quality ext. HD

frldyz

In Runtime
Messages
156
Location
Zimmerman
I'm still very much a novice on these boards and in the PC world.


My biggest fear is 1 day loosing all our family photos and videos.
My main rig has a 4tb HGST int. HDD <--- there are only photos and videos on this. No O.S or software.

I have a 5 year old toshiba ext. HD with 500gb. Works smooth and like new.
I have almost 3 year old toshiba ext HD with 2tb. Runs very very slow. And sometimes not at all.

Can someone recommend me a good quality ext. HD.
I'm paranoid 1 drive will die so I have no problem buying another as a back up.

Ive done many google searches and lots of mixed opinions and reviews. I hear a lot of negative about seagate, then WD.
But what brand is the best to go with?


Not interested in cloud storage.
Dont want family photos and videos out there.


Thanks everyone.
 
Regardless of how "high quality" of a drive you purchase, there's always the possibility that it will fail. The best insurance you can have is redundancy. Have multiple external drives and backup to each of them so if one fails, you have the other.

I personally like Western Digital drives and enclosures.
 
Agree 100% with strollin although my preference is for Seagate drives. Hard disk drives, at the end of the day, are mechanical devices and bearings, motors, magnetic pick ups, etc etc etc can all pack up. That is without the the problems that can be caused by viri and malware and the, general, unreliability of most computers. I would put my stuff on to solid state devices if I could find them big enough and cheap enough. Unfortunately that is not the case at the moment. I have 3 large external hard drives apart from my internal one. Everything of any importance is stored on the external hard drives. I have a 3Tb and two 1Tb drives. The 3Tb is nearly full and all the VERY important stuff, such as my family pictures are stored on the 3Tb and then backed up on to the two 1Tb drives. Even so I am running out of space. I suppose if you really want your files to be as safe as is possible then you would have to go down the NAS RAID routes but that is expensive and even that is not 100% reliable.
 
Get a wd nas. I have a pr4100 with 32 tb on it using 4 drives with striping and parity. Meaning if a drive fails it can be replaced and the array rebuilt without ever losing data. Just keep an extra drive or two in case you need to replace one. I also use a ups with auto shutdown in case of an extended power failure and 2 power connectors in case of a power supply failure.
For even better safety, use 2 of them and back up from one to the other.
You can also make a photo archive like I have done using m-disc bd disks to put your photos on. They will last 1000 years without degrading and becoming unreadable like traditional discs do after 8 to 10 years.
 
Last edited:
Burn what you want to keep on DVDs. Don't use RWs. Only thing that destroy DVDs are heat (like fire). Magnetic media are very vulnerable to lots of things.
 
Problem with DVDs is bulk and the time it will take the OP and me to transfer all personal files to them. if I was to go down that route, which I wouldn't and I wouldn't advise the OP to either, is to look at blueray. Also I have DVDs that I made a long time ago and they have become unreadable. DVDs that us mere mortals make are done on a dye substrate. Comercial ones the data is actually burned into the substrate. Domestic DVDs the data is recorded by changing the colour of the dye substrate. I think the dye colour change, eventually, makes the DVD unreadable. So for the OP I still say a RAID array is the way to go. But that is expensive having said so would hundreds of DVDs be expensive and extremely time consuming.
 
My DVDs are still readable after years and years of storage. You keep them in the dark.
 
Good for your DVDs. I didn't keep mine in the dark. But be fair, I have nearly 3 Tb of files on my drives. I don't how much the OP has but I bet it's quite a bit. It's not really a practical solution is it?
 
In today's world not really. Depending on magnetic media for safe storage is risky.
 
Again, redundancy is the key. Technician's solution of a NAS is good (lots of redundancy there) except it is cost prohibitive. If the data is critical and couldn't be replaced then the cost may be worth it.

I agree that backing up to DVDs or even Blueray is simply not practical if you have TBs of data to back up. Using a dual layer Blueray gives you 50GB of storage so it would take 20 discs to backup 1TB. If you have less than 50GB of data to backup so that it will all fit on a single disc then it is a viable solution.

IMO, magnetic media with redundancy is the only practical backup solution for large quantities of data.
 
Back
Top Bottom