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backup harddrives
Peter Madia, Student/Intern, Photo Editor
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Pittsburgh | PA | USA | Posted: 5:01 PM on 12.04.07 |
->> I'm thinking about getting two 500GB external hard drive to use for backup in addition to burning DVD's. What brands are you guys using? Any suggestions?
Thanks |
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Bill Miller, Photographer
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Thousand Palms | CA | USA | Posted: 5:13 PM on 12.04.07 |
| ->> Seagate, They have a 5yr Warranty. Check TigerDirect.com they have specials all the time. |
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Sean Harding, Photographer, Assistant
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Woodinville | WA | USA | Posted: 5:30 PM on 12.04.07 |
->> I agree with Bill; in my long experience (with literally thousands upon thousands of hard drives), Seagate tend to be the most reliable. They do still fail, of course. I've seen failures with all of the major brands, and none of them are foolproof. And it goes both ways; I have a cheap Western Digital external drive that statistically should be less reliable than many other drives I've had, but it's been chugging along for years without an issue. It's impossible to predict how long any specific drive will last, so it's crucial to have multiple copies of everything important.
You can usually save some money by buying the external enclosure separately from the drive, but it's up to you whether it's worth the trouble. If you take that route, I encourage you to read the reviews and specs for the enclosure you chose carefully, because I've seen some pretty bad ones (especially on the cheap end of the spectrum). |
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Russ Isabella, Photographer
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Salt Lake City | UT | USA | Posted: 5:59 PM on 12.04.07 |
| ->> I've used Maxtor with mostly good results (1 of 8 has failed). It's useful to hear that Seagate is a reliable brand. Personally, I wouldn't base my decision on the length of the warranty alone (not suggesting that's been advised) since reliability is much more important than being able to replace a failed unit (unless your backup system is so failsafe that a failed drive is nothing more than a minor inconvenience). |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 8:09 PM on 12.04.07 |
->> Seagate now owns Maxtor, with Maxtor largely assuming the lower end of Seagate's line.
There are also a variety of brands out there like Cavalry, Acomdata, Lacie, etc., that sell external drives that are based on their own cases and often use Seagate/WD hard drives. Some of the cheapest of these use refurbished drives. I own a couple of these and have had good luck with them, but be aware this is how some of those cheaper drive units are put together.
There are lots of sales on these, and like internal drives there is currently a "sweet spot" around 320-500 GB where drives are cheapest; larger and smaller capacities are more expensive/GB. 4GB of capacity/$1 is a very good price on these; 5GB/$1 is about the best you'll find. 3GB/$1 is more typical.
Also be aware of speed issues. eSATA drives are going to be fastest, but you will need eSATA ports on your computer. Firewire is next, with USB 2.0 the slowest. |
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Michael Clark, Photographer
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Santa Fe | NM | USA | Posted: 8:22 PM on 12.04.07 |
| ->> I agree Seagates seem to be the most reliable - the least reliable seem to be LaCie's - avoid them like the plague. I'll never buy a LaCie again. And their customer service is some of the worst in the industry. |
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Phillip Davies, Photographer
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Garden City | NY | US | Posted: 10:38 AM on 12.05.07 |
->> This is a good time of year to be buying as well. I just got a 500 GB Maxtor external drive on sale from Staples for $75.
Another alternative that can save you money is to buy an internal drive and put it into an aluminum external drive case. Get aluminum because it dissipates heat better than the plastic cases. Heat kills drives.
PhilD |
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Marvin Gentry, Photographer
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Birmingham | AL | USA | Posted: 11:09 AM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> What are the issues with the Lacie Drives. I am using one and got one still in the box. Should I return it and exchange it???? |
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Mark Cornelison, Photographer
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Lexington | KY | U.S.A. | Posted: 11:28 AM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> I would buy 2 and make a RAID 1 (mirror) out of it. |
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David Seelig, Photographer
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Hailey | ID | USA | Posted: 2:06 PM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> This is one of those areas where everyone has a different experience. I have had great luck with lacie the only drive that ever failed me was a maxtor . Make a back up of everything and pray . David |
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Fj Hughes, Photographer, Assistant
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Baltimore | MD | USA | Posted: 2:20 PM on 12.05.07 |
->> Seagate! Seagate! Seagate!
A good friend of mine owns a MAC based IT company and he told me to buy nothing else. He said he has seen more LaCie drives fail than any other brand. |
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Doug Keese, Photographer
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New Orleans | LA | United States | Posted: 2:22 PM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> I have switched from LaCie to G-Tech, which is highly recommended for macs, and I've had no issues. |
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Michael Clark, Photographer
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Santa Fe | NM | USA | Posted: 2:23 PM on 12.05.07 |
->> Check out some forums and you'll find twice as many LaCie failures as anyone else - though this might be biased because LaCie is the cheapest HD option out there and hence there are more drives that can fail compared to other brands.
I would advise against using hard drives that don't have a fan or cooling system for storing images on - that is the first key to a hard drives reliability - the internal drives are cooled by the towers fan system - G-Tech has good cooling systems as do some Seagate externals and other set ups. I would also recommend MacGurus.com and their port multiplier systems - top notch.
And of course yes, I am biased as I have had many LaCie drives fail - all drives will fail - it is just a matter of time - but the LaCie's (especially the Porsche design) have failed on me four times in the last two years - not such a good track record. |
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Ramsay de Give, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Santa Fe | NM | USA | Posted: 3:21 PM on 12.05.07 |
->> I've owned both Seagate and LaCie Drives... save yourself the stress of a crashed hardrive and purchase an Other World Computing drive. You will not regret it; this is something I can't say of LaCie and Seagate - they will crash.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/ME8FW7500G16/ |
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Ramsay de Give, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Santa Fe | NM | USA | Posted: 3:27 PM on 12.05.07 |
->> Here is another drive to look at... they are a bit cheaper, though still Other World Computing. I use these MiniStacks exclusively. Never once have they failed.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/ |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 5:41 PM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> Lacie cheap? Compared to what? They're among the most expensive external drives in my experience. |
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David Lucas, Photo Editor
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Travis Haughton, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Aurora | IL | USA | Posted: 7:47 PM on 12.05.07 |
->> I'll throw in a recommendation for Drobo also. I got mine about a month ago and set it up with Four 500gb drives.
Attach it to to one of the new Airport Extremes and you've got a reliable NAS setup, set up port forwarding and you can even access it across the internet by mounting it as a network drive.
I'm hoping the Drobo 2.0 will be a little more stable though. Every once in a while mine just dismounts itself and I have to unplug it and plug it back in. Seems to be an Airport Extreme Firmware issue though. Might not be Drobos fault. |
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Gavin Werbeloff, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Atlanta | GA | USA | Posted: 7:52 PM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> I'm going to put in a vote for Western Digital MyBook Premiums. I have a 500GB RAID 1 setup that I've been happy with. Firewire 800 and built in redundancy, I'm a fan |
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Joel Kilby, Photographer
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Charlotte | NC | | Posted: 10:49 PM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> FWIW, we cracked open some broken LaCie drives at work and found Western Digital hard drives inside. I personally have never had a LaCie fail, but the video editors were blowing them up left & right last year. |
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Jeff Kowalsky, Photographer
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West Bloomfield | MI | United States | Posted: 11:17 PM on 12.05.07 |
->> I have been using the 2TB Western Digital My Book Premium Edition II hard drive. It has RAID mirroring and has USB 2.0 & FireWire 400/800.
I see it is on sale at buy.com http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=205075640 |
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Chris Mackler, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Athens | OH | United States | Posted: 11:47 PM on 12.05.07 |
| ->> I just bought a SimpleTech 320 Gig Harddrive for around $100, and it seems reliable...are they a reputable company? |
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Mike Morelock, Photographer
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Greenwood | AR | USA | Posted: 3:33 PM on 12.06.07 |
->> The huge problem to me with the Drobo is the USB 2.0 only acces. It's just plain slow for moving large amounts of data.
As far as hard drives I always buy whatever is cheapest $/gb. That's probably in the 400-500gb range right now. And I buy two, and do two copies and also still burn a dvd set for offsite storage. No matter the brand they all make bad models from time to time which will invariably be the one you buy lol, and even the best hard drives still die with time, even more so if you just set them somewhere not using them. So plan on them failing, plan on them getting bigger and cheaper with time and buy the biggest cheapest you'll need.
I asked in another thread but never got a reply about Windows Home Server.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/defau...
Anyone considering a Drobo should look into it. You can buy just the sofware and install it on an old box you have, stick a bunch of drives in it, plug it into your network and you have a Drobo on steroids. It will do automatic backups of up to 10 computers on your network, even Apple computers I think. It combines all the drives it has into 1 big drive and the data is mirrored so you're ok if you lose a drive if it's not too full, you can remote access it while you travel. You don't plug a monitor or keyboard into it so it doesn't take up a lot of space. All the reviews i've read have been positive, something i'm totally not used to seeing from a Microsoft product.
Or you can buy a ready built server with Windows Home Server installed on it. This is the first one on the market
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UY1WSK
It comes with 1 500GB drive. They make another model that comes with 2 500gb drives but it's $150 more and you can buy your own 500gb drive for less than that. The HP comes with 4 drive slots but it also has an e-sata port so if you really need a ton of space you can plug an external e-sata box into it.
The downside for now is the damn thing is on backorder lol.
And here's another cool hard drive product that you can't get yet.
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_details.php?id=15140
There's another company that makes a SATA drive cradle but it's USB only(and I can't find it in America either), this one will have an ESATA port.
Oh and someone asked about Simpletech. They don't make the actual drive just the case it goes in. You might buy one and it have some great drive inside, you might buy the same thing a month later and it be a piece of crap. That said, I have a portable 120GB simpletech and so far it's performed flawlessly, but it's just a backup of the data on my laptop, i'd never trust it or any hard drive by itself. |
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Marvin Gentry, Photographer
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Birmingham | AL | USA | Posted: 4:06 PM on 12.06.07 |
| ->> Ok This might be off topic for this thread , but here it goes. Does anyone know of a program that will mirror 2 hard drives but the full res file on one and then reduce the other file to a 2 meg file in a batch process. I would like to do this so that I would have backups but not have to have complete hard drives. |
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Aaron Vogel, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Ventura | CA | USA | Posted: 5:03 PM on 12.06.07 |
->> I'll be purchasing one of these: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10950
I've heard what others have said about Lacie, and I've had problems with them myself, but all drives eventually fail, so I'm not terribly inclined to say one brand is better than another (of the majors anyway).
Instead, I'm looking at this disk and thinking, "wow, Firewire 400 or 800, RAID 5, and available on Amazon.com for less than $1000!" |
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Craig Glaspell, Photographer, Assistant
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Murrieta | CA | USA | Posted: 5:53 PM on 12.06.07 |
| ->> So...you got the backup drives going, but want some sort of managed process to backup the drives to DVD. If I have a 100gb of images and want them all on DVD is there a application (MAC) that will divide the 100gb of images into 4gb DVD's to burn? |
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John Plassenthal, Photographer
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Vandalia | OH | USA | Posted: 10:01 PM on 12.08.07 |
->> My day job is in IT and for your purposes a name brand is going to be reliable. Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi, and Fujitsu are all pretty much on par as far as the overall hardware.
As far as warranty goes, pay attention to the warranty terms. Most drive manufacturers warrant the drives through the vendor as opposed to a manufacturer's warranty. For many years Western Digital, Maxtor, and Fujitsu were the only drive manufactures with true manufacturers warranty.
I'm not sure whether Seagate changed before it took over Maxtor or not. Seagate warrants drives for 1, 2, 3, or 5 years depending on where you buy them.
Western Digital has a standard warranty of 5 years for all desktop drives (3.5) and 3 years for all notebook drives (2.5) across their product line.
Hitachi is fairly consistent at the 3 year mark.
In 20+ years in IT I've had hard drive failures of nearly every brand so I'll preface the following with the statement that the playing field is relatively level. Over the years I've seen the companies provide varying levels of quality and their responses to problems with their drives. For my $ I put Western Digital at the top and Hitachi at the bottom based on a long term view of how they manage their business and the product lines with respect to quality and customer focus.
When I buy for home I only buy Western Digital and have never had a failure with my personal equipment (knock wood). I've recently been doing some upgrades and just retired at 8GB drive that's been used in a browser pc since 1998 and is still in good shape. I've also just pulled a couple 100Gb drives that have been running non-stop since May 2004. I find WD proves over time to be the best value for the $ in terms of both quality, speed, and storage for the $.
For what it's worth I hope this helps. |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 10:14 PM on 12.08.07 |
->> Marvin,
I don't know of a program designed specifically to do what you want, but it should be fairly easy to automate with PhotoMechanic (either with the File/Save As command or via a PS Droplet) or PhotoShop directly (through an action, batch process, or the Image Processor).
Chuck |
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Bill Miller, Photographer
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Thousand Palms | CA | USA | Posted: 10:11 AM on 12.09.07 |
->> Apples & Oranges - That's what many of you are comparing. Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi, and Fujitsu are hard drive manufactures.
Lacie. SimpleTech,OWC Mecury and many others are housing manufactures.
That being said you have to really make two choices, 1st which drive manufacture, and second which housing and features do you need/want. |
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Christopher Szagola, Photographer
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Richboro | PA | United States | Posted: 11:08 AM on 12.09.07 |
->> Craig,
Toast will do a back up that will divide 100gb into into the amount of DVDs it needs to complete the task. |
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John Harrington, Photographer
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Washington | DC | USA | Posted: 12:04 PM on 12.09.07 |
| ->> Drobo is a bad idea. It's file system is proprietary, meaning you can't pull a drive out of their box and put it into a PC or Mac system and read it. Meaning, if your Drobo box goes down, so too the data. This alone should be a dealbreaker. Why they wouldn't use a standardized file structure is beyond me. Also, what if they go out of business? |
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Robert Seale, Photographer
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Houston | TX | USA | Posted: 12:30 PM on 12.09.07 |
->> Slightly off topic here....but Christopher reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask.....
When using Toast to backup large folders filled with image files, I've noticed that it typically splits the last file of each DVD over two disks. When you transfer the disks and open them, you have to use their software to "recover" the split file.
Maybe I'm crazy, but this drives me nuts, and seems like a very bad idea....I've looked through all the software literature and preferences, but have not yet found a way to make it partition the DVD's with whole files only.
Has anyone found a solution to this? Should we even be using Toast, or is there a better solution out there.
Thanks in advance.
(Back on topic: I've been using the OWC Mercury Elite Pro drives, which contain two 500 GB Seagates in a mirror RAID, with a Firewire 800 connection (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/RAID/).....so far, so good......fingers crossed) |
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Adam Bird, Photographer
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Grand Rapids | Mi | United States | Posted: 12:53 PM on 12.09.07 |
->> This will take a minute.
I have a 2 terabyte data server using raid 5 for both speed and redundancy on my data. 1.8g intel processor with matching motherboard with room for 4 sata drives and 2 ata, 3 open pci slots for 3 sata controllers for future expandability and room for a total of 12-14 hard drive depending on cooling configuration. 2 gigs ram, antec 430w 2 rail power supply with 450w ups. That with 1 500g hitachi sata drive, $430 (already have the ups) if you build it yourself. I'm using three other hard drives that I have been inside enclosures that will be moved into the box. Every drive will have a small (5g) partition that will have a copy of the software raid controller and the operating system, which is a version of lynix using HFS filing system since it works groovy with the mac. This will be a black box, no internet connection that will talk to my laptop by patch cable. The OS is the only thing that is catchy, it's a bit complicated to set up both the os and the raid, but it's not hard to find people to do that. When the software is done with mine, I'd be willing to share.
Anytime I want to upgrade, I just buy another 500g sata drive for about $100 (thanks newegg.com) and plug it in, the raid automatically configures it for data redundancy. If the box goes down, I just plug the drives into a new box, and there is no way for the entire raid array to crash barring a house fire or something since it's on every drive and there's no hardware controller running off a battery.
Total cost, after figuring in buying 4 new hard drives and the software customization, about $1k. And it's long term upgradable, easy to work with and about as stable as can be found.
Oh, and nothing proprietary. If you go with cheaper components, you can build this for quite a bit less. The big thing is to pay for a top notch power supply and ups- fluctuations in electricity often lead to some form of data loss or other. And the raid 5 through patch cable (1gig ethernet, came on the motherboard) is crazy fast.
That said, you should still do dvd backups. |
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Sean Harding, Photographer, Assistant
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Woodinville | WA | USA | Posted: 1:21 PM on 12.09.07 |
| ->> I ended up writing my own script to split folders of files between disks (without cutting any single file apart). Unfortunately, it's not really in good shape to share -- the amount of work you'd have to do to make it work for your setup would probably be equal to the work of creating it again from scratch... |
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David Ahntholz, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Cleveland | OH | USA | Posted: 4:17 PM on 12.09.07 |
->> Adam: Though it's one of the better options now, actually there are people questioning the long-term stability of Raid 5, hence the development of Raid 6. I have been researching several options. The whole system will go down if you have a second drive fail before getting the new drive installed and updated (probably not likely, but there could be an off chance the drives happen to be from a bad lot) or if the system encounters areas of data loss on the other drives as it is trying to rebuild.
I've been considering buying one of the Stardom enclosures from Other World Computing ... though I'm still researching
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Stardom/SL36202SLB2/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Stardom/ST66005SS2/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Stardom/SR66005SWBS1/
Marvin: I think you could build an Automator Action (assuming you're on a Mac) to process the image in different ways to 2 different spots. Apple has a listing of Automator actions, including some that will resize or process Raw files, or you could have Automator interface with Photoshop CS and newer. (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/imaging_3d/). Once built, you can set Automator to watch a folder and process the images copied to it. So, in theory, you could drop your JPEG files into the folder, and have Automator copy the high-res to one spot, then resize and move the resized/compressed version to another. This wouldn't really be a "mirror," though. |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 5:06 PM on 12.09.07 |
->> Redundancy is the goal; various implementations all have their own cost/benefit.
I have an even cheaper RAID 5 server solution than Adam (detailed here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/message_display.html?tid=25975), but it's not my only backup. I'd call it my "primary" backup, and I like RAID 5 because of its cost & performance relative to other options.
My primary workstation has separate drives for unprocessed and post-processed photos, as well as documents and personal photos. Each of these three drives is backed up locally to an external Firewire/eSATA drive. In addition, each of the three drives is backed up over my gigabit LAN to the RAID server - the unprocessed photos to the RAID 5 array, the other two disks to external USB drives connected to the server.
Finally, there's a set of eSATA drives that I keep off-site. |
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Adam Bird, Photographer
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Grand Rapids | Mi | United States | Posted: 8:23 PM on 12.09.07 |
->> My system is no where near as redundant as Chuck's, but my drives are from different batches and manufacturers- 2 seagate, different build dates by 6 months, 1 wd, and 1 hitachi. I've got another seagate on the way that will be installed as a hot drive so that if one of the array drives fail, it'll automatically move in it's place. I'm not sure how, but my IT guy assures me it will, and that assurance is worth something.
I also burn dvd's with just raw images (none of the cleaned and cutlined stuff, just straight from the camera) that are stored off site. That whole fire thing again. |
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Bastian Ehl, Photographer
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Magdeburg | _ | Germany | Posted: 11:47 AM on 12.10.07 |
| ->> You might also look in the recent Photoshelter rebates - 1TB space for 500,00 $. |
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Ben Shyman, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 11:02 PM on 12.10.07 |
| ->> I own six LaCie drives (two 160 GB and four 250 GB) and have never had a problem with any of them. |
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N. Scott Trimble, Photographer
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Lake Oswego | OR | USA | Posted: 11:38 PM on 12.10.07 |
| ->> I have had crap luck with Lacies, mainly bad soldering of the firewire connections. So far, My Book WDs have been great, and favored in reviews in CNET and the like |
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Robert Seale, Photographer
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Houston | TX | USA | Posted: 12:13 AM on 12.11.07 |
| ->> Just so they don't get a completely bad rap.....I have 5 LaCie 250 G drives that I've never had any problems with.... |
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Sean Harding, Photographer, Assistant
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Woodinville | WA | USA | Posted: 12:23 AM on 12.11.07 |
->> If you guys want to know nitty gritty details about hard drive failures, here's a good paper:
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso, 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007), pp. 17-29.
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
(Written by some people from my employer, but I had nothing to do with it, and obviously I'm speaking for myself and not my company in all postings here...) |
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