HDD Death

[Nielk1]

Except my PC wipes out any USB2.0 connected HDD and possibly others. An IDE2USB1.1HDD is the ony external I have gotten working without wiping.

[VSMIT]

Then you've got an issue with your OS. It's not the fault of the drive.

[Nielk1]

Then you've got an issue with your OS. It's not the fault of the drive.

Duu?

I actually suspect the USB firmware.

[ScarleTomato]

As users of RAID controllers what brand would you recommend? I bought an adaptec RAID controller to upgrade to SATA and the controller itself has failed on me twice within a year. I'd heard adaptec was pretty good but my experience has been just the opposite.

[GSH]

I'm not using a real-RAID for offline backups. Just a lot of inexpensive disks that plug into an external box that my computer uses eSATA to talk to. When the drive is offline for all but an hour a month, there's no need to pay $$$ for a RAID card.

-- GSH

[Commando]

Once I save up some money, I'm tempted to get three 1 tb harddrives to set up a raid 5.  My motharboard supports it along with a lot of more expensive +$200 motherboards.  I think even my old motherboard might have supported raid 5.  The only issue is it requires three harddrives and 1/3 of each is used up for parity backup.  Raid 5 uses data stripping for speed and distributed parity in case one drive dies.

If you do get your computer up and running, raid 5 may be a good alternative as long as your mb supports it.  Windows XP and Vista unfortunately don't support anything but raid 0 and possibly raid 1.  Raid 0 being mirroring and I think raid 1 being data stripping.

[Red Devil]

I'm getting a Blu-Ray recorder.

[GSH]

Maybe newegg was reading the above. Sale (thru the end of the month): 1TB drive, external docking station. $72. Details here: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/17780 . It's a manual backup strategy, but so are burning any sort of cd/dvd/bluray.

-- GSH

[sabrebattletank]

Would a drive like that one be suitable for non-backup purposes? As in a general purpose hard drive?

[GSH]

Follow the links on techreport.com . That HD runs slower (5900rpm) than most desktop HDs (7200rpm). Faster than most laptop HDs, though. Running it over USB would be a further speed tax if you're using it for general purpose HD.

I wouldn't boot off of such a drive, but as a secondary drive for large media files, it'd probably do great. I already do that at home -- have a small & fast (150GB at 10,000rpm) boot drive, and a larger & slower (300GB at 7200rpm) secondary drive.

-- GSH

[Clavin12]

What if it was firewire?

[technoid]

What if it was firewire?

Hmm, it would be more or less the same with 1394A, having a little less CPU overhead than USB 2.0.  This is partly one reason why a good percentage of DAW recording use FW, due to less process load and therefore has better sustained transfers.  Well unless you have a 1394B setup (800 Mbits and higher), then it would travel about twice as fast.  Firewire can be more expensive too. Then again, USB 3.0 is on the horizon, with 10 times faster theoretical throughput than USB 2.0. 

[Clavin12]

Is it possible to boot from fire wire? I mean how would your bios know where to look.

[Nielk1]

Company reports 100% data recovery, but now I ow about $1K.

[TheJamsh]

holy frik nuggets...