Known-good drive manufacturers, known-trusty PC review sources

^Some

Yes, those "real" tape drives cost like $5k for a single drive. This is one reason that backups are shifting to disk based.

I've done full restores on my system several times. It takes an hour or so from a USB drive. It's really handy to be able to do a restore of the system and applications (as long as they haven't been changed since the last backup) without touching data.

backup.

The main reason is that disk is *cheap*.

de

ttdesign.com

I've had good luck with the latest Hitachis, unfortunately, they've been bought by WD. I've had two new Seagates die within a week of each other a couple of months ago. Bought them cheap, not a bargain, but what was available off the shelf. Several WDs have had bad spots develop and corrupt file systems this year. Lots of practice on data recovery and system restoration. In the last 4 years, I think I've sent one Hitachi back and was able to move all contents before failure. Run cool and quiet. Hitachi bought IBM's drive biz quite a few years back now and improved them, not Deathstars anymore. I've had a couple of Toshiba drives, external USBs that have run well for several years. Downside is that they're kind of behind the tech curve, not keeping up with drive sizes. If you can find them cheap, they'll do.

Tom's is one hardware site I've used, a lot of the current reviewed material is oriented towards the gamester/overclock/water-cooled crowd. NOBODY does reviews like PC Mag and Byte used to do. For one thing, the number of suppliers has contracted in the peripheral market, for another, a lot of motherboards come with most everything needed for a system already on them.

Until you get into the spendy enterprise level drives, you really don't see a lot of improvement in MTBF. I won't be buying more Seagates in the near future though, and WDs will be a second choice as long as Hitachis are around. Seagate has also shortened their warranty period on their consumer level drives to a year, take that as a warning.

Sweet spot these days is around 1T for desktop drives. Price is still not down to pre-flood levels but run about $70-80 per terrorbyte. Buy at least two, one for a backup. I use hot-swap SATA drive bays, I can mount backup drives and do image copies that way. If a drive craps out, I just slip in the last good copy and continue on, data recovery is done on another machine with the dud hanging off as a secondary. RAID is NOT a backup strategy.

Stan

I see Windows 7 report ~20MB/S from USB2 when writing files plus updating the directory, which requires a head seek. A plain HDTune read test might reach 30MB/S. In my bus-speed-limited laptop USB3 transfers at 60-80MB/S, tests at up to 120.

A few days ago a max-accuracy HDTune error scan of a 1.5TB drive on USB2 took 1209 minutes.

The HDTune error scan on a 2T drive using USB2 took over 24 hours, before I upped the accuracy which slows the test. The drive transfer rate may fall in half as it nears the end track. I haven't recorded the time to transfer hundreds of gigabytes to see how closely it matches HDTune's speed.

This is a typical of what I get:

That Seagate starts at 80MB/S, ends at 40.

Here is a drive due for replacement:

The boot drive can look similar due to Windows overhead delays, but the pattern doesn't repeat. The S.M.A.R.T. for a notorious drive like that could show high read errors or seek errors, I've seen both. I've also kept the drive in use for months without it failing.

jsw

"Me too"

I have always had excellent results with WD drives, and I have a small Hitachi drive with a lot of hours on it, and it is still working great.

Jon

So does Windows 7 Ultimate. It's buggy though (the mirroring that is).

Oh? I have yet to find a cheap RAID controller with onboard parity. The cheap boards offload parity onto the CPU and have nearly the same performance penalty as pure-software RAID 5.

If the objective is reliability you do not need RAID 5. A mirror (known also as "RAID 1") works just as well.

Hard disk failure rates look like a pretty deep bathtub. If they last six months, they'll easily last six years.

Euro billion in million million isn't it????

Make that you ONLY get what you pay for - (if you are lucky)

backup.

even

on

Particularly USB Western Digital Go-Drives - which seam to be the predominant "back-up" around here.

+1

--
Les Cargill

backup.

Pardon the spelling but...

Quest custodet epso custodes?

Backing up a fragile media - with the same fragile media?

Yep.

Found it - Long Scale vs Short Scale

backup.

can't

even

on

have

that

It's not fragile when it's properly RAIDed. Look it up, disk based backups with data de-duplication is where enterprise class backups are going. Data de-dup is pretty cool as well and saves a lot of space since most of what gets backed up each night is the same as the previous night.

Look for standalone array controllers that connect to host(s) via SCSI or fibre Channel connections. All RAID functions are handled by the array controller and usually the controllers are redundant as well and everything is warm/hot swappable. With these arrays, unless you really screw up the configuration you will never loose data or loose access to the data even as various components fail. Fault tolerant since nothing is fault proof.

I expect Washington to start calling it in British mode - A Billion is 1000 times more than ours and so forth.

Mart> >