[WinPartners] Recommendations for external hd for backup use?

[Kerem B Limon]

Quoting Christine Verick <verick at MIT.EDU>:

> Hi Winpartners!
> 
> I'm e-mailing on behalf of a helpdesk client, Roberta Brawer, who is 
> interested in purchasing
> a 200gb external hard drive for backup purposes. It also needs to be 
> USB. She's hoping to purchase
> one this weekend.
> 
> She is not subscribed to winpartners as yet, so please cc: 
> roberta at mit.edu on your responses.
> 
> She is currently looking at the Maxtor One Touch II, but she hasn't 
> seen many reviews for it
> good, bad or ugly and would like to know if others have any opinions to
> offer.
> 
> Her requirements:
> 1. Reliable (most important)
> 2. Easy to use
> 3. Reasonably priced

Maxtor is the brand I've had the worst reliability record with so far. We've had
a nearly 50+% DOA or dead-within-15-mins-of-use on the most recent batch of
>160 GB drives we've purchased. That said, most other hard drive vendors do not
offer enclosure/drive bundles. So, you either bite the bullet with Maxtor or go
with a third party enclosure vendor that puts a stock OEM drive in a stock
enclosure, then charges you an unnecessary premium on top.

As hard drive capacity has gone up lately, the reliability seems to be going
down. It's now become routine for me to expect hard drives to fail. I RMA 4 - 5
drives, usually at least 1 personal, on a monthly basis. I no longer trust a
non-mirrored or non-RAID drive for any type of data, period.

My recommendation would be to get *two* backup drives, preferably of different
brands. Make sure they work as a standard mass storage device under Mac OS,
Windows, or whatever OS you're using (most will out of the box) and backup your
data to them periodically, alternating between the two. Odds of the two failing
simultaneously are little, at least not until you can get the first one to fail
replaced. Now this may not sound cheap, but think of how many man-hours of work
your data takes to recreate, if at all, and you see what it's worth; the rest
of the math is easy. You can save money by buying bare drives and empty
enclosures and hooking those up to make your own external drive, which requires
minimal hardware savvy, but can save a lot.

As for ease of use, this depends. These are simple storage devices; so you could
just drag-drop copy your data to them as a means of backup or use the built-in
Windows backup client (since this is winpartners) to do full system backups.
For more sophisticated scheduling and backups, some bundle an OEM Windows
version of the abomination otherwise known as Retrospect. You could also use
something like Ghost or DriveImage to do drive cloning, but that's an advanced
topic. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the space here to detail the
possibilities.

> 
> Govconnection has one listed:
> Maxtor
> Maxtor One Touch II 200GB Hard Drive
> Platform: N Mf #:E01A200 $211.40
> Item #: 5529552
> 
> She wanted to see if this was USB, but the Maxter page does not have 
> this listed as 200gb. It
> says it's only a 250gb hard drive so I'm not sure if this is a typo 
> on Govconnection.

GovConnection probably has an older batch in stock they are liquidating as
opposed to the current retail model from Maxtor. It's almost certain to be USB
since Maxtor goes for the larger Windows market, which is not big on
FireWire/IEEE1394. There should be specs somewhere on the Maxtor pages. You can
also ask GovConnection by calling them.

Another place to try is MicroCenter. They have lots of Maxtor, WDC, and Samsung
drives, some even in external enclosures as well as third party brands in
stock.

> 
> Thanks for any help you can offer!
> 
> Christine
> 
> Christine Verick
> Information Services & Technology
> MIT Computing Helpdesk
> verick at mit.edu

Kerem

Kerem B. Limon
kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail