usb hard drive very awesome!

malcolm

Had to format my hard disk to fix video corruption in all d3d games so I grabbed a usb hard drive to back everything up. Cost was $100 Canadian and holds 80 gigs. Worked great, I was able to back up all my art and my porn collection with no hassle, the copy time was just as fast as a real hard drive as well. I recommend a usb hard drive for backing up your art files, worked great for me!

Rick Stirling

I've been running a 40GB external USB drive on my mac since I got it - it backs up all our files every night.

poopinmymouth

I have a 600 gb Dual disk raid 0 stripe external hard drive that runs firewire 800. It can do sustained 91mb a second transfer. Backups work pretty fast, hehehe.

Eric Chadwick

We had two different Western Digital USB2 external drives die in the last 3 months, nothing unusual in the setup nor the usage.

What brands are you guys using?

Justin Meisse

dang poop!
You might want to check this microsoft support article out
Windows XP service pack 2 causes a drop in firewire speed to s100 for some reason.

EricChadwick, we use Micronet external firewire drives to back up our archives, they've been pretty sturdy so far.

MoP

I had a 120gb external Maxtor for backups and archiving which died on me last year. I was not best pleased since the warranty had just expired the month before.

Eric Chadwick

Ow Moppius. Poop's got it right, raid is the way to go.

Thanks Justin.

sonic

Raid1 on your internal drives is the best way to go. Your entire drive is mirrored, and it happens as you're saving onto your primary drive.

MoP

Yeah, I think the next computer I build, I'll probably do a nice big Raid1 array. Raid0 is nice and fast, but I don't like the idea that if one of the drives goes down, you lose all the data even if the other drive is working fine.
Raid1 sounds ideal for me, since I frequently forget to backup things, and I seem to have really bad luck with hard drives recently.

thomasp

i have two dual-port u160 scsi controllers in one of my machines. does 80-90 megs/second off a single drive (10 000 rpm), around 150 megs/second sustained off two drives sharing a single bus in software-raid. since i have four of those busses, three of them are raided-together and non-raided drives for backups and one for user data hang off the last one. makes for quite the data throughput at around 330 megs/second atm. can only recommend it. hardware raid would be even better - probably faster and less cpu utilisation.

another nice but pricey way to incredibly increase the system responsiveness is to use 15 000 rpm drives for the OS/apps. even if the drives deliver data faster than your system can chew it, you still benefit from the incredibly low seek times - like a third of those of a pretty fast 10 000 rpm drive.

save some money for the earplugs though...

oXYnary

[ QUOTE ]
Raid1 on your internal drives is the best way to go. Your entire drive is mirrored, and it happens as you're saving onto your primary drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

But it slows your throughput greatly. I think you mean Raid 5. It stripes like raid 0, and has some redundency like raid 1. The problem is you need at least 3 disks to even start one.

hawken

I've been using a porsche 250 gig for about 2 years, very handy

StrangeFate

i have a small 160gig USB drive (its just the size of a laptop drive with a case around it) that i always take to work, and use secondcopy with it to sync my work/art/mp3 content between my work and home machines.

arshlevon

mee too strangefate, the best part is NO power brick!!, powered only by the usb, and its so tiny i can pretty much fit it in my pocket.

Toomas

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Raid1 on your internal drives is the best way to go. Your entire drive is mirrored, and it happens as you're saving onto your primary drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

But it slows your throughput greatly. I think you mean Raid 5. It stripes like raid 0, and has some redundency like raid 1. The problem is you need at least 3 disks to even start one.

[/ QUOTE ]

Eer raid 1 doesnt slow anything, write speed is the same as single drive and read speed can be theoretically 2x faster.
I currently run 2 250gig WD's in raid 1 and it works great.

Lee3dee

i've been using a 64K usb Harddrive for years now. Its helped me in backup alot of work.

Daz

just don't leave 'em lying around for the cleaners to pick up ;-)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4913174.stm

thomasp

at least, these were "properly" stolen. over here people managed to buy used harddrives or whole computers from ebay that were sold on behalf of the police. data still intact, of course