Fastest/most reliable hard drive backup

addylad

addylad

addylad

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Joined
14 Aug 2007
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447
Hi,

I need to regularly backup a laptop which has a ~150gb HDD, so I'd probably want a 320gb drive to back up to. I would preferaby like the quickest method possible, and I would be willing to pay more for the quickest/most reliable methods. At the moment my budget is £70-100. It has to be external.

Also I don't know whether it would be USB/firewire/ethernet/via WLAN/SSD? And if anyone could also suggest some good backup software that would also be great.

Thanks. :)
 
Last edited:
I got an icybox external hd enclosure and put a samsung spinpoint sata drive in it. Thats as fast as you can get and it works great.

The enclosure itself is £35 but you can then buy just about any drive to go in it and you have the choice of sata or USB
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-004-BT

Samsung Spinpoint 320gb (£40)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-057-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=768

You're probably better off going for a 500gb disk though as they aren't much more money.
 
Oops sorry didn't realise it was for a laptop. In that case sata isn't really an option but the usb will still work. An enclosure with Firewire would probably be your fastest option but the limiting factor will be the HD speed. Depending on how much speed you need you could go for a SSD or a raptor.
 
herr_brush said:
Oops sorry didn't realise it was for a laptop. In that case sata isn't really an option but the usb will still work. An enclosure with Firewire would probably be your fastest option but the limiting factor will be the HD speed. Depending on how much speed you need you could go for a SSD or a raptor.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Are there any reliable SSDs which are under £100-120?

And would these go into an enclosure?
 
The general rule of thumb for enclosures is...

eSATA > Firewire > USB

At least until USB3 comes along anyway, and probably even then.

So, see what ports you have on your laptop (there are laptops with eSATA ports), and then pick an enclosure to match and a drive to fit.
 
For software, I'd highly recommend DriveClone (by FarStone) for backups.

I use it to completely clone my HD to a removeable drive so I can have my system up and running in a couple of hours if my HD or XP were to die.
 
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