Yes, I know there have been previous threads about this before - these do not help me however. I don’t have a budget, i’ll find some money for whatever looks good.
I need something to:
Back up my current 140gb Drive
Provide loads more space for my videos, pictures, and music.
Sure, I could just go and buy any old External Drive, with enough space (the more the better) - but I know there are going to be a load of things that effect it’s performance and whatnot. For instance, I am tempted to buy this but I don’t know much about these specs. I need to basically know what’s good, and what’s bad :).
What are you trying to back up? Is it data on the 140Gb drive? How much space is that? Do you want to back up the OS also? Do you want to make a drive image or just back up data? Could you do what you want with an optical drive? The 2Mb cache of the unit you’re interested in looks a little weak. Is that unit USB 2.0 or FireWire? USB 1.x is hopelessly slow.
I want to back up all of my data, and the OS (in case it all just suddenly dies or something). It is data from my two HDDs, a 74.2gb and 73.3gb partition. Drive image/Back up data?! Whatever it is I can do to keep everything if my laptop died. And I don’t understand that other jargon… do you mean slow as in… slow when transferring new data to and from it?
Most of the current external USB drives are going to perform similarly. Some use the smaller 2.5" laptop hard drives while others use the larger 3.5" desktop size drives. Laptop drives use less power but are more expensive per GB. Desktop drives generally perform better but use more power and generate more heat. Other factors to consider are if the enclosure has a fan or other means of cooling the hard drive. If you’re going to use the external HD as active storage rather than just backup storage (backup storage gets unplugged and isn’t on all the time) then an enclosure that properly cools the drive is more important.
Other than that, the USB external drives are all pretty similar. Some extras is that some include FireWire (IEEE 1394) connections in addition to the USB conection. That adds to the price.
Are you using Vista or XP? The available backup solutions are different for each OS.
Ill plop in to say this. Use Acronis True Image. It will copy your whole hard drive, including the OS onto your external drive, and it will partition the new drive to be using its full capacity. Some other ways of copying drives to bigger drives end up partitioning the bigger drive to the size of your old drive, and leaving you with gigs of empty space that cant be used until that space is partitioned.
Hopefully that isnt confusing with the mentioning of partitioning. =p
As Harper pointed out, the 2mb cache on that drive you linked to would be the one reason why I wouldnt buy it. And as John said, watch out for how things are going to be cooled. For me, I only use external drives as a quick plug in, unplug, type of thing, so temperatures have never bothered me.
Im just saying, some programs and attempts at cloning data from one small drive, to another bigger drive, will not fully utilise the bigger drives space.
So lets say this happens. You copy the 140gigs over to the 320 gig drive. The 320 drive then only shows 140gigs, and nothing else, so you partition the empty space, so now your 320gig drive will have one 140gig section, and then one 180gig section.
What you want, is that when you copy over the 140gigs of your data to the new drive, it leaves the new drive as one full partition and the drive wont be separated into two parts.
But what’s wrong with that? (I’ll get it someday…)
I think understand now. You were saying that this program will copy the data and partition the drive for me, so I can use the surplus space. (I thought you meant it would fill the drive)
Whatever it is I can do to keep everything if my laptop died. And I don’t understand that other jargon… do you mean slow as in… slow when transferring new data to and from it?