Just got a new computer, now need to get an external hard drive for backup. The computer is a Dell running Windows 7. I've looked on Bestbuy web site and it seems the Seagates are a little better reviewed than Western Digital. Either one of these any good (or bad)? Any other recommendations or advice? Thanks.
I have two Seagate Drives (500 and 640). They are very simple to use (plug and play) with a simple setup for backing up your folders. I just had my computer crash last week and it couldn't have been easier to plug my backup drive into my new computer (going from PC to mac mind you) and copy the images onto the new Hard Drive.
The one thing that bothers me with the Seagate is there is so much clutter within the drive (that support its backup capabilities) and you have to dive through multiple folders to get to the actual material that is backed up... there's a chance I simply didn't know how to configure it properly but I did find it kind of annoying.
Now that I have my new computer, I have my original seagate backing up JUST my photos, with my other seagate (the 640 gb) is used by my computer as the backup drive, so EVERYthing gets backed up to that, which means my photos will be in 3 places. Let's just hope there isn't a fire or 3 backups will be as good as none!
No experience with Seagate, but we've been using WD exclusively for about 4 years without a single glitch. We have their portables for use with laptops and 1T units for our desktops. They're "reasonable" enough compared to the cost of DVDs or CDs in terms of volume that we actually use them for "backups" of our backups. We shuffle duplicates off to a safety deposit box every time we fill one, just in case the ones on our desktop fail. Or we have another earthquake. Or another tsunami. Or volcano. Or house fire. Or breaking and theft. Can't be too careful when it comes to archiving images.
We haven't really shopped around, instead just buying ours from Costco or Walmart, whichever is handiest when we need more.
Angela, I have two Maxtors and one Western Digital. All three are well over 3 years old now and have never been any issue at all. Maxtor is of course owned or merged with Seagate these days. I bought all three at Amazon from the many vendors that supply the units to them at fairly good prices IMO.
Posted by John W. Wall on July 29, 2010 at 4:57 PM
I've been using these guys for years with no problems: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11016
I don't save photos to my computer's hard drive at all. Computers come and go. Everything goes onto external drives which can be plugged into any computer, any time.
I use LeCie exclusively with my Macs. Started with an 80GB when that was as big as the hard drive in my desktop, then added a 250GB, and then a 500GB. And for my laptop I picked up a nice small 250GB portable drive with both USB and FW200 ports.
Raw files are backed up primarily on the 500GB drive plus on CDs, as well as files waiting to process on one of the internal drives in my desktop (an 80GB plus a 160GB I added internally).
The OS, all applications, and all created documents other than image files are backed up on external bootable drives.
Posted by David Bostedo on July 29, 2010 at 10:31 PM
If you don't want a portable drive, I'd suggest buying an enclosure and an ordinary desktop drive, rather than a prefab drive in an enclosure. You can save a lot of money, and you have a drive that could actually be installed on your desktop. You can also upgrade it to a larger size or faster drive in the future if you wish.
This is the enclosure that I have. It's quiet and the fan keeps things cool - drives that are used a lot without good cooling tend to die more. Of course, as a backup drive, you might not use it a whole lot. It also has an eSata port which is loads faster than USB or FireWire. If your computer has an eSata port, or card, it's the way to go.
I do also have a Western Digital passport drive for portability.
I have a 2TB Time Machine as my primary backup. I don't know if a Windows 7 computer can use Apple's Time Machine, but it's very handy. I also user a script to back up my entire Aperture photo library to one of two external 750GB WD drives, and swap those drives between my home and office weekly. A catastrophe at come only costs me a week's photos.
Another Thumbs up for LaCie!! Excellent external HD. I have a 500gig just for backing up my photos. I used it with Window Vista before then subsequently with my new Mac and then with my wife's Windows-7 Premium, it easily moves from OS to OS without an iota of trouble! I also have a Simpletech, but that is for some reason is only readable in my Mac.
I have a 2TB Time Machine as my primary backup. I don't know if a Windows 7 computer can use Apple's Time Machine, but it's very handy.
My wife uses the Time Machine feature religiously too, Jim, and it's saved the day more than once. I'm working mostly on a MacBook Pro these days and haven't bothered. When I get my next desktop machine, setting it up will be one of my first steps. We've recently picked up a PC-based net book for travel, and it made her really nervous not to have the auto backup on a recent trip.
Posted by Robert Cubit on July 30, 2010 at 8:14 PM
Angela, over the years I’ve selected hard drives for both professional (IT) and personal use. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with hard drive models from most of the large manufacturers. For many years, I purchased only Seagate HD’s. However, three of my five 1TB Seagate Barracuda (7200.11) drives, on my home image editing computer, were affected by the now infamous firmware issue (resulting in sudden death of the drives) which began about two years ago. This issue was wide spread and continued for many months before Seagate finally acknowledged the problem and allowed owners of the affected drives to return them for free repair, prior to failure. Two of my drives failed within one week of each other---one was my main image drive with 30,000+ images and the other was the backup for that main drive. If I had not had a third off-line archival copy, I would have lost 40-years of work! There are now reports that Seagate has resolved this particular issue on newer drives---but it sure left a bad taste in my mouth! More recently, I have read reports that Western Digital has had some issues with an IC on the controller board, which may randomly fail on some of their models.
So the bottom line in researching drives is that it’s far more important to consider the history of a particular model than to try to find the “best” manufacturer---like Toyota, they ALL have problems from time to time. Unfortunately, most of the magazine and online reviews only test a small number of copies (often just one) of a particular model and do not consider long-term reliability. I’ve found one good source for this info is the ratings on high-volume OEM sites like Newegg.com. Unlike Amazon, a fairly high number of reviewers on Newegg are experienced IT guys that have purchased hundreds of drives. When you find multiple comments like “we bought 50 of these drives for our IT dept and 30 of them failed within the first six months”, you know there’s likely a problem.
For specific current recommendations, some of the Western Digital models consistently receive high reliability ratings (base on my own experience, Newegg and several IT sites I monitor). The WD 1TB Black Caviar internal drive (installed in a good external enclosure with an eSATA port) is a very good bet. I’ve been running six of these drives for over 18-months, with no problems.
If you want a very robust, simple to implement, expandable and low cost solution, consider purchasing an external hard drive box or dock, where the bare drives are quickly removable and can simply be plugged in and out in seconds. For example, here’s an eSATA dock that allows you to treat HDDs like high-capacity floppy disks:
This unit allows you to access two HDs. So you could have one plugged in all the time as a primary working image drive. Then, plug in a backup drive to make copies of your images. This copy, or better, a third copy can be completely disconnected from the system and stored as an archive copy, in case of a power surge or virus. In this way, a copy can also be stored off-site in case of flood, theft or fire, for just the cost of a hard drive. When you need more room, plug in a larger drive. The only drawback is that you need to handle and store the bare HDs carefully. But I’ve been doing this for nearly one year, with no problems. One other bonus is that you can easily make an exact clone of your boot drive with a program like Acronis True Image, so you can recover from a failed boot drive within minutes.
Also, if you want to learn some very robust methods to protect your images (from beginner to advanced), I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book. The new version has updated info on some of the best hardware, software and strategies to protect your data.
Tons of good info there and I can't add much except my own experience. I have had or have now a large variety of brands...Seagate, LaCie, Maxtor, Western Digital, Fantom Green Drive. The ONLY ones I've ever had problems with over a period of about 10 years have been Western Digital. I have two WD drives that simply will not mount to one computer but will mount to the other. ALL other drives (roughly 23 of them) mount to both computers. Both computers Windows XP SP3. I also don't like that WD automatically turn on with the computer. There is a switch to turn them off, but no way I've found to disable them starting with the PC. I prefer a switch to both turn on and off. Just a quirk of mine though. JR
Posted by Don George on August 10, 2010 at 9:40 PM
I have used Seagates for years without a problem. Its probably already been said but I don't go higher than a 500gb for the reason of not having all your my eggs in one basket.
Discussion
13 repliesThe one thing that bothers me with the Seagate is there is so much clutter within the drive (that support its backup capabilities) and you have to dive through multiple folders to get to the actual material that is backed up... there's a chance I simply didn't know how to configure it properly but I did find it kind of annoying.
Now that I have my new computer, I have my original seagate backing up JUST my photos, with my other seagate (the 640 gb) is used by my computer as the backup drive, so EVERYthing gets backed up to that, which means my photos will be in 3 places. Let's just hope there isn't a fire or 3 backups will be as good as none!
Hope this helps.
- Luke
We haven't really shopped around, instead just buying ours from Costco or Walmart, whichever is handiest when we need more.
I don't save photos to my computer's hard drive at all. Computers come and go. Everything goes onto external drives which can be plugged into any computer, any time.
Raw files are backed up primarily on the 500GB drive plus on CDs, as well as files waiting to process on one of the internal drives in my desktop (an 80GB plus a 160GB I added internally).
The OS, all applications, and all created documents other than image files are backed up on external bootable drives.
This is the enclosure that I have. It's quiet and the fan keeps things cool - drives that are used a lot without good cooling tend to die more. Of course, as a backup drive, you might not use it a whole lot. It also has an eSata port which is loads faster than USB or FireWire. If your computer has an eSata port, or card, it's the way to go.
I do also have a Western Digital passport drive for portability.
My wife uses the Time Machine feature religiously too, Jim, and it's saved the day more than once. I'm working mostly on a MacBook Pro these days and haven't bothered. When I get my next desktop machine, setting it up will be one of my first steps. We've recently picked up a PC-based net book for travel, and it made her really nervous not to have the auto backup on a recent trip.
So the bottom line in researching drives is that it’s far more important to consider the history of a particular model than to try to find the “best” manufacturer---like Toyota, they ALL have problems from time to time. Unfortunately, most of the magazine and online reviews only test a small number of copies (often just one) of a particular model and do not consider long-term reliability. I’ve found one good source for this info is the ratings on high-volume OEM sites like Newegg.com. Unlike Amazon, a fairly high number of reviewers on Newegg are experienced IT guys that have purchased hundreds of drives. When you find multiple comments like “we bought 50 of these drives for our IT dept and 30 of them failed within the first six months”, you know there’s likely a problem.
For specific current recommendations, some of the Western Digital models consistently receive high reliability ratings (base on my own experience, Newegg and several IT sites I monitor). The WD 1TB Black Caviar internal drive (installed in a good external enclosure with an eSATA port) is a very good bet. I’ve been running six of these drives for over 18-months, with no problems.
If you want a very robust, simple to implement, expandable and low cost solution, consider purchasing an external hard drive box or dock, where the bare drives are quickly removable and can simply be plugged in and out in seconds. For example, here’s an eSATA dock that allows you to treat HDDs like high-capacity floppy disks:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817801059&cm_re=hard_drive_dock-_-17-801-059-_-Product
This unit allows you to access two HDs. So you could have one plugged in all the time as a primary working image drive. Then, plug in a backup drive to make copies of your images. This copy, or better, a third copy can be completely disconnected from the system and stored as an archive copy, in case of a power surge or virus. In this way, a copy can also be stored off-site in case of flood, theft or fire, for just the cost of a hard drive. When you need more room, plug in a larger drive. The only drawback is that you need to handle and store the bare HDs carefully. But I’ve been doing this for nearly one year, with no problems. One other bonus is that you can easily make an exact clone of your boot drive with a program like Acronis True Image, so you can recover from a failed boot drive within minutes.
Also, if you want to learn some very robust methods to protect your images (from beginner to advanced), I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book. The new version has updated info on some of the best hardware, software and strategies to protect your data.
Bob