Thread: 1 terabyte, $99!!

I purchased a USB 3.0 1 terabyte drive today for $99. The thing is really fast and small. Every once in a while I sit in amazment at how far we have come in computing. My first hard drive was 5 megabytes and cost about $2000.00. How times have changed!!

I ain't buying it till it comes with thunderbolt
I do have a 32G on my keychain though and it's smaller than the smallest key, I bet the memory itself is the size of my pinkie fingernail

Ummmm Can one of you smart guys send me a PM with a link of what I should buy to back up my Picture files and the I-tunes music Library that is 32 gig, so I was thinking some kind of simple USB type thingy, key word being simple, OK really simple.... I was told 1 terabyte should be more than enough

Buy whatever's on sale over 300GB. The important part is the software that does the backing up.
There's a dumb way to do it, which is just simple copies of your 32GB, so in 300GB you get 10 copies, in 1TB you get 30 copies.

The better way is to not duplicate the common parts of these copies and each time record just the differences to the last backup. That way you can have daily backups of your music for years that won't take more than 50GB and are fast to make too. Unfortunately I don't know anything about backups in the world of windoze, so somebody else will have to guide you there.

If you are going to just keep it at home and don't care about portability the larger 3.5" form factor will be a lot cheaper than the 2.5" portable that Jeff bought. Also I'd bet your computer doesn't support USB3.0, so if I'm you I'd buy a 3.5" USB2.0 hard drive that the vendors are trying to offload since the computer can't take advantage of the faster 3.0 interface anyways, and when you buy a new computer that supports it you can buy corresponding 3.0 drive for much less money than you can buy it today.

may be something like http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...0597&CatId=136

I remember going on a field trip in high school to the Princeton plasma physics lab where they were braging about having over a terabyte in their computers to keep records of whatever magic simulations they were running. That was probably about 10 years ago now I can buy the same amount of memory for less then a hundred dollars and in 18 months it will prolly cost $49.99. Oh how fast technology moves.

I remember the Apple IIe's with the giant floppy disks. Then I remember 320 mb hard drives. Then 1 gig was a lot of system memory. Now video cards alone have up to 2 gigs and you can buy a 2 tb internal hard drive for under $100. It's madness...

Originally Posted by gugi

Buy whatever's on sale over 300GB. The important part is the software that does the backing up.
There's a dumb way to do it, which is just simple copies of your 32GB, so in 300GB you get 10 copies, in 1TB you get 30 copies.

The better way is to not duplicate the common parts of these copies and each time record just the differences to the last backup. That way you can have daily backups of your music for years that won't take more than 50GB and are fast to make too. Unfortunately I don't know anything about backups in the world of windoze, so somebody else will have to guide you there.

If you are going to just keep it at home and don't care about portability the larger 3.5" form factor will be a lot cheaper than the 2.5" portable that Jeff bought. Also I'd bet your computer doesn't support USB3.0, so if I'm you I'd buy a 3.5" USB2.0 hard drive that the vendors are trying to offload since the computer can't take advantage of the faster 3.0 interface anyways, and when you buy a new computer that supports it you can buy corresponding 3.0 drive for much less money than you can buy it today.

may be something like http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...0597&CatId=136

From Vista onwards, it is dead simple to do it as you describe. You can make full / incremental / differential backups to remote storage.
I only make full backups, regularly. I also use hardware mirrored drives to protect against disk crashes.

No, let's not distract from the real issue here: that Glen has not been backing up his stuff until now
Reminds me of a colleague who had to use his Christmas bonus to send a drive to a data recovery lab because he hadn't taken backups of the disk that contained all his holiday pics and movies. His PC was only a year old and he hadn't expected it to crash because it was still new-ish.

Originally Posted by gugi

may be something like Hitachi HLSDBUB5001BBB LifeStudio Desk 500GB External Hard Drive - 500GB, USB 2.0 at TigerDirect.com

I had nightmares with those Deskstar drives in IBM laptops, so I'll never buy another IBM or Hitachi drive (IBM had a lawsuit, but we had some Hitachis fail as well). Of course, everyone probably says that about the brand of drive once they experience a failure.

A similarly-priced solution would be a Seagate external. Bonus that it's powered over USB, so no extra AC adapter needed:
Newegg.com - Seagate 250GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive ST902504EXA101-RK

Yeah, over the last years we've used multiples of every single brand and unless you shell out for the enterprise level, the reliability of the consumer ones are just the same no matter the brand. I've had both form factors 3.5" and 2.5" and each manufacturer WD, Hitachi/IBM, Seagate/Maxtor, Fujitsu, Toshiba fail. The only one that hasn't failed so far has been Samsung, but that's probably just luck because I've only had 2 of them so far.

The difference of that seagate on newegg is that it's the 2.5" portable, so at the same price point it's half the capacity of the 3.5" desktop hitachi.

Also power over USB needs a high-powered USB port on the computer, and it's not something take for granted as most of my USB ports cannot power those and I have to use additional power anyways.

My personal backup solution currently is a 2TB WD in an enclosure that I've had for 4-5 years. I've just swapped the harddrives in it. I think I started with 300GB, then 500GB, and now its 2TB which I bought last year for about $80 iirc.

Not saying i'm old, but i remember leger books and pencils