To go external or internal

[Gamefreak501]

Hi everyone,

When I go out with my camera, I tend to fill up my memory card, come back home, chuck all the contents of my memory card onto my hard drive and then clear my memory card for next time.

I have an 80gb (well, 74.5gb really) which is about 3/4 full up, with everything - games, work, photos, the works.

I am looking to get a second hard drive which will act as a backup for my pictures and any important work I want to keep hold of.

However, I am leaning more towards an external, non-USB hard drive, so if my motherboard decides to kill itself, and anything connected to it, I'll at least have that backup of my important things.

It hasn't happened to me yet, but well, you never know.

The only trouble is, I have a Asus K8V, so I don't have a fast interface (like a firewire port) but I do have a number of PCI slots free which perhaps I could use for a firewire controller.

All help greatly appreciated!

 

[Mikey1280]

You could add either a Firewire or USB 2 (I'm assuming you do not have one) controller, the latter might me more useful for other things apart from your camera. External hard drives are quite expensive to start (about £60 minimum IIRC) but as the storage increases the price per gb gets significantly cheaper.

 

[chaparral]

I would highly recommend you backup your data to DVD-R discs as well if the data is very important to you...

For a case of only about £8 for a pack of 25 DVD-R discs can really save you a lot of stress and headaches for if them harddrives die one day.

I have lost much important data myself and it's not till it to late.That you think why did i not backup on to DVD-r discs.

 

[Gamefreak501]

I am not sure about getting a USB 2.0 drive because the interface may tie up the CPU, although I am thinking of spending about £100-£200 on a firewire controller and the external drive. I still need to get an additional hard drive too, because my 74.5gb hard drive is getting full up!

At the moment, I backup my important stuff on DVD-R discs, but for additional protection, I would like to buy an additional, and more 'accessible' and quicker backup solution like an external hard drive.

Cheers for the help so far!

 

[Mujja]

If you are only going to connect and use the drive when you need to backup your data then CPU usage isn't really an issue. I've had upto 4 USB2 hard drives connected at once to a lowly 1.1Ghz (Dell X1) laptop and didn't really notice and performance loss.

You can save money by buying the hard disk and external enclosure seperately. With the cost of hard disks so low now I don't even bother with DVD-R. One 300GB disk backups up ally my data and another 300GB synchs to that.

Cheap DVD-Rs aren't worth using for backing up data as I've found after a couple of months I'm unable to read data back from some discs, and that's on with the same burner they were written with. So I've ended up writing to the DVDs at 2x for reliability and paying extra for branded quality DVD-Rs.

 

[Gamefreak501]

I'm thinking of ordering this lot:

Akasa 3.5" Black External Enclosure (£26 OcUK)

2x 200GB ATA-100 Western Digital Caviar (£58 x 2 OcuK)

Making that all about £142.

I'll be using one hard drive as my external backup and one for my internal stuff as my 74.5gb is getting a little small now!

How does that lot sound?

Cheers for the help so far!

 

[Mujja]

Sounds good, might as well get one more external enclosure to put you 80GB drive to some use.

Or keep your 80GB in your case and use the 2x200GB as backup drives. Synch the data that is irreplaceable across the 2 external drives. I use SyncBack (freeware).

 

[Gamefreak501]

Sounds good, might as well get one more external enclosure to put you 80GB drive to some use.

Or keep your 80GB in your case and use the 2x200GB as backup drives. Synch the data that is irreplaceable across the 2 external drives. I use SyncBack (freeware).

Cheers Mujja,

I think I'll get a second enclosure for the 80gb hard drive Or I may sell it and get a third 200GB hard drive and synch the data on it