Which backup hardrive?

Messiah Khan · 7 Nov 2007 at 10:20

Im after a 500Gb hardrive to act as short terms backup for my 2 X 250Gb WD drives. Rather than RAID, I will be using a script that runs every 24 hours to synchronise the data. This way if I delete somthing accidentally, or get a virus I stand more chance of saving the files. It will mainly be used for backup of Photographs, ie .TIFF, .JPG and .NEF of about 5-50Mb each. The number 1 feature im looking for in this drive is reliability. Im going to be backing the data up to DVD as well, but I want that to remain as a last resort. Its going to be housed in a Smartdrive 2002c enclosure. the ones ive got my eyes on at the moment are;

Seagate Barracuda ES 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Western Digital RE2 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache

Are there any others I should consider? And which of these do people recommend? All my other drives are WD so im leaning towards the WD one. Whats the difference etween the standard RE2 drive and the (WD5000YS)version?

Frippy · 7 Nov 2007 at 10:43

My mate was undecided about those 2 drives, in the end all drives are much of a muchness. Get which ever is cheaper, my mate went for the WD as he previously had a Seagate fail on him, once bitten and all that.

rpstewart · 7 Nov 2007 at 11:01

Why not consider the WD AAKS 500Gb drive? It's cheaper than either the RE2 or the YS, both of which are slower than the AAKS.

The RE2 and ES drives are the "Enterprise" versions of the desktop drives so have slightly different bearings, slightly longer MTBFs and other optimisations for 24/7 operation. Unless you're going to hammer the drive (which sounds unlikely) then I don't see there being any benefit in paying the premium.

Messiah Khan · 7 Nov 2007 at 13:18

Cheers guys, ive gone with a WD 500Gb AAKS in the end. On another note, I know you back your pictures up on DVD/CD as well rpstewart. What way do you go about this? Do you use any sort of automated system, or do you just manually choose which files and folders need backing up? For me it wouldn't be too hard to do manually as the folders are named with the date, but I was wondering if there is a better system.

rpstewart · 7 Nov 2007 at 13:58

Manual process here, once I've got 4Gb or thereabouts of a similar subject I'll burn a disk. It tends to end up a bit out of chronological order but if I'm looking for a particular macro shot I know it'll be in one of a small number of "macro" folder/DVDs rather than trying to remember what date the shot was taken on.

The one thing I do in addition to this is add an MD5 file to each DVD using CDCheck, each disk is verified once it has been burned. What I need to do sometime soon is go back and re-check all the disks to make sure they're OK but I'm not looking forward to doing 130 odd DVDs at 15 minutes a pop...