apelike Posted December 27, 2015 Share Posted December 27, 2015 I have one of these. Just connect it to your computer, drop in any SATA drive and you can use it as an external drive if it is formatted. I have one also but the trouble is that they are very slow being USB 2 and I cant get the e-sata port to work despite having an e-sata header on the PC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_bloke Posted December 27, 2015 Share Posted December 27, 2015 I'm currently testing out a cloud based backup solution for my media centre, rather than buying new drives. My biggest worries were uploading material that is copyrighted (backups of my DVDs, CDs etc) and the speed in uploading and downloading the data, but the small print says they don't care as they don't know what I've uploaded unless I share it (I'm not) and I got a 2 MB/s upload speed. My test data was just over 1 TB and it uploaded in less than 2 days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomoney Posted December 28, 2015 Share Posted December 28, 2015 the photos/videos burn to cds or dvds,the rest try printing them off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexAtkin Posted December 28, 2015 Share Posted December 28, 2015 the photos/videos burn to cds or dvds,the rest try printing them off. HDDs are generally far more reliable for long-term storage, especially as the chances are you will upgrade to a larger drive every few years. A CD/DVD can fail very quickly, depending on the quality of the die and where you are storing it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomoney Posted December 29, 2015 Share Posted December 29, 2015 alexatkin look at the gaurantee 12 months or 36 months thats how long they can last,the average is 4years possble 6 at most,a cd around 10 years and a dvd aroud 30 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apelike Posted December 29, 2015 Share Posted December 29, 2015 alexatkin look at the gaurantee 12 months or 36 months thats how long they can last,the average is 4years possble 6 at most,a cd around 10 years and a dvd aroud 30 years. A guarantee is no measure of how long things can last. I have several IDE hard drives that are over 10 years old and still work as hard drives are very reliable if treated properly. I have several CD's and DVDs that are in good condition mechanically but can no longer be read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexAtkin Posted December 29, 2015 Share Posted December 29, 2015 (edited) alexatkin look at the gaurantee 12 months or 36 months thats how long they can last,the average is 4years possble 6 at most,a cd around 10 years and a dvd aroud 30 years. The guarantee has little to do with real-world life span, its just how long they are willing to take responsibility for replacing the drive. The manufacture date of the HDDs in my server are 2008, 2009 and 2014. None of those drives are showing any signs of failure and unsurprisingly only one of them is in warranty. I also have a 2007 drive that I recently powered up and is still working fine and looking on my shelf, drives going back to 1999 (20GB) that I only stopped using as that size is useless today. I can't test it right now but I would not be surprised if it still worked. The life span of a HDD is more about its operational hours than a fixed limit. CD/DVDs on the other hand use dies and glues which naturally age, so DO have a finite life time. Atmospheric conditions add another factor that can cause them to fail early. I have CD/DVDs which the surface has peeled off, some which look absolutely fine but will not read. From my own experience, once a CD/DVD starts to fail its much harder to recover any data. If its peeling you shouldn't really try. HDDs on the other hand I have had a much higher success rate. Plus like I said, the nature of backing up to a HDD is that rather than writing the data once and filing it away, you are more likely to move it all to a bigger HDD periodically. Edited December 29, 2015 by AlexAtkin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickey finn Posted December 29, 2015 Share Posted December 29, 2015 The issue with Memory Sticks is like SSD's they have a limited life in terms of number or read/writes. Why just backup data when you can backup the entire system for when you need to replace the hard drive? 1. http://www.ebuyer.com/282538-buffalo-1tb-velocity-drivestation-hd-lx1-0tu3-eu 2. And use this excellent free software to backup your entire OS and data: http://redobackup.org/ I never knew this, very interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexAtkin Posted December 29, 2015 Share Posted December 29, 2015 That's rather pricey for 1TB, unless you really need the full disc encryption, which seems unlikely. You can get 2TB at Amazon for only £1 more. Maybe even cheaper elsewhere, that was just a quick look. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now