External Hard Drives

[leslan80]

 I need to purchase a couple of external hard drives for work.  One will house our collection of scanned photographs while the other will probably house our database information.  I do know that currently photographs total about 200 MB, so we'll need a hard drive that will allow us to grow -- not all photographs are scanned.  Any suggestions?  

Comments

[scottdp]

You can walk into pretty much any big-box electronics store and walk out with a 500GB (that's 500,000 MB, although you probably know that) for no more than $200, and probably for far less. Maybe stick with the major brands like Seagate, Western Digital, or Maxtor.

You'll find drives of different physical sizes (as opposed to storage size). The smaller ones contain laptop hard drives, which are slower and less reliable. The bigger ones contain desktop drives. These are better.

On a final note, make sure to use redundancy. Not to tell you how to do your job or anything, but while hard drives make good storage sense because they're cheap and capacious, they are not exceptionally reliable long-term. For each drive you use, I would recommend having at least 1 additional drive that holds the exact same information, stored in a different physical location. That way you're less likely to lose data due to a drive failure or some other incident that destroys the drive.

[leslan80]

So Western Digital is a well-known brand? I've found a few that I'm looking at (1TB+) from that company, but I don't really know anything about it.

[scottdp]

It is. I'm a few years removed from my habit of keeping up with these things, so I don't really know the current consensus on the reliability of their drives. Of course, even if I did keep my knowledge current, such reputations are generally based more on speculation and hearsay than real data.

Unless anyone else knows better, I'd say it's safe to go with WD. Possibly check to see how long the warranty is; presumably if a company puts a longer warranty on a drive they have more faith in it. Maybe. In any case, redundancy should still be considered a strict necessity.

[sidbyrd]

The brand of drive is less important; the critical thing is to have a backup, to make sure that backups are actually happening regularly and copying the right things, and to test that the backed-up data is actually restorable. Keeping at least the last two versions of everything, all on different disks, is good if you have the space. I basically do the digital archives for Fondren, and I would probably start to twitch if anything important were just stored on a portable drive. If you backup right, though, the brand of drive isn't especially important

[leslan80]

What technical staff