Wow. This is a big one. The drives are now running at one-half
to 4 Terabytes. This is enough to hold nearly 100 full-length
movies in DVD format.
Internal or External? Depends upon what you need. On a
desktop, I buy a second internal and then go for externals. On
the laptop, you get what you bought. I would recommend the
largest on the option choices. You cannot go back after you get
the thing.
The popular brands are best: Maxtor,
IOMEGA, Western Digital to name a
few. Avoid the off-brands and avoid Western Digital.
The newest external use USB 3. I hae no experience with this
version of USB. There is also for internal and external
SATA. I have a desktop with SATA and will learn about it
soon. I think that external SATA/ASata will be obsolete when USB
3 settles in.
Cute Idea. The USB version seemed to work well. I bought
what I
thought was a USB version that turned out to connect to my Wi-Fi router
instead, It could not connect to USB. It came with software that
permitted anywhere usage. And it said that you had t use that
software. When installed, it crashed my Windows XP system so
badly
that recovery looped. I had to break recovery and use "Safe Mode"
t
uninstall it. Western Support said that that was not supposed to
happen but gave no remedy. I returned the junk to Sam's Club and
bought a My Book USB version online.
This lasted about a month. Unlike the Cavalry which died sort
of gracefully, the Western Digital just decided to never power up
again. I mean just dead. Oh, when you plugged it in the
blights blinked to let you know that it was getting power. Then
the lights go out and nothing happens until you repeat the
plug-in. No recovery. No nothing. Just dead.
This is why you need a recovery/backup disk -- and you know the backup
will not be a Western Digital. I understand there was a class action law suit against Western Digital for this junk.
Costco is selling Western Digital and Seagate.Drives. I like
Costco but sometimes they make mistakes too. If your local Costco
store is pushing the Western Digital drives, look for another store.
When one of my old USB drives died (I forget probably a Maxtor --
but it had been around for a while), I bought a Cavalry online.
See below. When it died after a few weeks, I bought the My
Books. See above. I know that my recovery process is
brutal. I recover what I can, copy it to the new drive. I
recover some more, copy it to the new drive. I repeat this until
I can get no more to recover. I copy all of the files of a
similar nature from my other drives. Now I have a brand new drive
completely full of files. Some complete. Some
partial. Many duplicated. Many in directories different
than their origin. Many with different file names. Manually
trying to figure out what I have is impossible. But now I back up
the new drive for fear that I can lose everything. I have a
program which goes through the files and locates duplicates.
Exact duplicates are easy: Name, size, date, contents. The
first scan identifies these and I can organize directories and too the
exact copies. Then I scan again for identicals with different
names. Same process but slower. The copy utilities
sometimes add 1 or 2 bytes to the end of a file. I locate these
almosts. Somewhere there is some program which truncates 14 bytes
off the end of JPEG files. I locate these almosts. I
analyze the directories that remain I have a program which will
locate and then remove empty directories. Believe me: this
process generates many empty directories. By now my drive is
about half full and the real work begins: a scan for partial files
contained in other files. On 250 GB, this program runs about 12
hours and the poor little hard drive is quaking in its boots. But
when this process is completed, I am down to mostly good, complete,
files and no duplicates. I rush to back these up before anything
else happens. Neither the Cavalry nor the Western Digital
completed the process. The IOMEGA did and I am still using
it. My estimation of IOMEGA has risen considerably.
Note: I now have 3 IOMEGA drives on my system and they all work just fine.
2010: one of the IOMega
drives just quit. It died gracefully so was able to replace
it without losing anything. I bought another one.
2011: Another IOMEGA drive quit. Again gracefully. Now I have 2 IOMEGA and one Seagate.
I bought a 500 GB Cavalry. I should have read the reviews
first. Out of the box it runs so hot that you need to keep it
away from everything -- including your fingers. The instructions
tell you that it requires a certain power-up sequence from
Windows. It can go into what I call a "Gamboling" mode where you
can feel it doing something inside and it is not even connected to the
USB cable. When connected, it will get lost and die. Then
it hangs the USB port and nothing in your computer works again until
you turn off the Cavalry. You then get a message from Windows
that it could not rewrite the directory and thus the Cavalry had a bad
format. You cannot reformat the drive without losing
everything. The drive will not stay up long enough to run a
"checkdisk" as Windows recommends, You are stuck. It took
me over two weeks to recover what I could from the drive. The
cycle is: copy what you can. Reset it it and repeat. You also
have no confidence that when it hung, you got the data you think you
got. With the directories crashed, you have no idea what you can
recover and what is lost. Good luck guys. Cavalry is your worst nightmare.
I am now using Vista on my laptop. My daughter is using
7. We each bought a Seagate 2 Terabyte Replica Hard Drive from
Costco. Hers installed on WIndows 7 with no problem. Mine
refused to install properly and I lost all of the special features --
including their backup program -- one of the reasons for choosing this
disk.
What is the problem? The disk comes with special driver
programs on the hard rive itself. Why they do this I do not
know. It is a stupid idea. They provide a disk with the
backup software -- it could just as well contain their special
drivers. Maybe they are afraid that someone will use their backup
program on some other disk. Paranoia.
Vista installed my hard drive as it does with any other mass storage device. Then the Seagate software pops a window saying that Windows did not install the device properly. The window says that it is going to repeat the process itself with the drivers on the drive. The documentation tells you that the pretty little lights on the front only work with their special drivers. It does not tell you that their backup only works with their special drivers.
After repeated Seagate software re-installs which appear every time
the disk is referenced, I have two choices. I can return the junk
to Costco. I can reformat the drive and hope it works without the
pretty lights and without their strange software. I chose the
second option since I bought the drive for a reason: I need the space
and I am traveling and have no backup.
I have always hated gimmicks. This is a bad gimmick.
There are always nerds that think gimmicks are "neat". Too bad
that companies employ them. They belong in their basements where
they can do harm only to themselves. I could care about the
lights on the front. I need the backup and it does not
work. I need hardware that works when you plug it in -- without
nerdy tricks. If they need optional software, make it available
and make it work and if it does not work, make it recoverable. I
lose all respect for a company that resorts to gimmicks. I
have lost respect for Seagate.
The drive appears to work. From where I have it mounted, I
cannot see the lights. Lights? They have 4 lights on the
bottom. These tell you how much of your disk is in use by
quarters of capacity (I think). With 2 Terabytes I am concerned
about quarters? If you are into game playing, give me a digital
display. And for God's sake, make it work.
I do not know but I have a few ideas. I am in a high dust
environement. There is a half inch of beach sand on the floor of my
car. Dust. A very fine dust covers everything I have. Next to my
computer I have a HEPA air filter. ANother HEPA sits across the room.
I have to change the filters outside since just removing the cover
drops a load of dirt on the floor. I know that the drive mechanism is
sealed but the things do have air vents and moves a lot of heat.
Another theory is that the hard drives are not prepared for today's
use. Ant-virus programs scan the entire disk weekly. With a full
terabyte drive, this process beats the drive forabout 6 hours. I mean
really beats on it. I have my own file search programs but I force
them to wait 500ms between new file references.