I'm planning to buy a second hard drive as a backup drive. This is mainly for protection against hard drive crashes. I'm thinking about Western Digital 80GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive. It's about $115 with shipping at newegg.com. I need to get a USB 2.0 PCI card too-- it's only about $10-12. Is anyone using USB 2.0 external drives--any comments? Thanks, Chinook
Why not just use a second internal hard drive? Unless you have a second computer you may want to move data to, it is faster to use an internal drive and they are usually cheaper.
I use 2.0 USB slim box setups. They allow me to backup, switch or tap into other computers at my leisure through the USB connections. The slim boxes cost $14 (eBay). I populated my main data backup slim box with a six gig drive that cost me $35 (eBay also). So for about $50 I have the best of both worlds. I even have one with a sixty gig drive ($175) that I use for parties with my music collection as well as some higher end games to keep my laptop drive as open as possible. I'd recommend this setup anywhere
pspr, I'd like to be able to have immediate access to the data if something happens to the PC including getting stolen. Also, eventually, I'll get a second PC so this way moving data around will be easier. Chinook
Chinook, you might also consider an internal drive in a mobile rack (removable drive bay). Thats what I went with for multiple PCs. In a mobile rack, the drives are easily moved from PC to PC, or removed entirely for security (great for backup/image data). A Google search for "mobile rack", "removable drive bay", "removable rack", etc. will return a lot of info. Here's one link: http://www.cruinc.com/htmldocs/products/dataport.htm I know Newegg carries Kingwin mobile racks, and maybe others. Directron carries a few different brands: http://www.directron.com/mobilerack.html
A good way to do this is to have four drives and do a Raid 0+1. You can do this today with SATA or even IDE drives with the right controller. If you really want to do it right, get a SCSI controller with dual channels and a MB and computer case that supports hot swap drive bays. Arrange the drives so that they end up on different controllers - not only will that will increase your R/W performance, it will also give you extra fault tolerance from a controller failure or a drive failure, all without having to bring your computer down. I do this with a hardware SCSI controller that is onboard on the motherboard with some inexpensive LVD SCSI drives that I bought for about $250 (for four drives that I picked up cheaply.) I then do software RAID from Windows 2000. You can also just buy a MB with a RAID controlller, but those motherboards are quite a bit more than non RAID motherboards, or you have to shell out some cash for a RAID PCI card. If you just want to back up _data_ to removable media, there are many ways to do it...External USB is good, but I do not like external drives unless I can boot from them. Many of the older computer's BIOS will not allow you to boot from USB... nitro
Hi nitro, You probably run Windows 2000 Server. Can you do software raid on Workstation? Be good, nonosense