I have a couple of AMS VENUS DS-2316CBK FW/USB External Enclosures + plus drives, and need a third setup to backup all my data.

I’m thinking about getting another Venus enclosure and was wondering if anyone can recommend a 750 GB drive that would be good as a bootable and media disk. (I’m using an Intel Mac).

Thanks.

The only drive I’ve ever had go bad prematurely was a Western Digital, I now avoid them. Using Seagates lately.

It’s pretty hard these days not to buy a decent drive, I’d say with a Seagate Barracuda, Western Digital Caviar or a Samsung Spinpoint it’s hard to go wrong.

I have had great luck with Western Digital as well as Seagates.

e-man’s right, generally not much difference between various hard drive brands these days. I second WD or Seagate.

I third Seagate. WD as a distant second. IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi are all decent. Avoid Maxtor.

I swear by (and rarely AT) Seagate.

Thanks all!

Just got a Maxtor Network Storage Server and am loving it. You plug it into your Wireless Router and then you can access it from anywhere within that network. I have a small Western Digital that I use for Time Machine but the Maxtor allows me to offload files from my laptop that are old but still need to be saved.

I tried a NAS once. But man it was so slow transfering data of any size I got mad. lol

Instead I took the drives out and made a RAID5 for my workstation. does about the same thing, and if I need anything I can share it. but the parity and having redundant backups is so nice.

Do you transfer a lot of big files?

As far as drives go i think it’s been said already, just try to get the biggest cache you can. big drives should be 16m. older ones are most often 8.

Well I just got it so yeah I just uploaded about 40gig of information. It was decent. But I went into it knowing that it was going to be a little bit slower. I do not have another machine that I could plug in a hard drive though. And I like that I can move around the house and still have access. So it was a trade off. A little bit of speed for mobility.

There’s no doubt that a NAS is great. it’s just too slow for me because I’m OVER paranoid about backups.

I have lost drives too many times. most recently I lost a hard drive during a move that cost me literally 7 years worth of data. Photos, photoshop work, entire website sources etc. it devastated me. but it was all my fault.

After those lessons I’ve learned to over do it. it’s better to have too many backups than not enough. Now my system drive is RAID1 (mirrored) and my data drives are RAID5. I do images of the PC every week for full images, and incrementals every 2 hours with acronis. by doing them so often it takes virtually no time, or resources. I never notice it.

But I’ve gone through tons of drives. My best experience is with Seagate. Barracudas are what I use now. Seems like I’ve had more wd drives fail than anything, but I’ve had more WD drives than anything so it makes sense.

I think, since drives are so cheap, there’s no excuse not to have backups of everything. Just like RAM is so cheap theres really no reason not to have 4gb.

I’ve been eyeing the 2nd gen Drobo. Dan at Hivelogic has an excellent article called Regarding Backups that is a solid introduction to the topic.

Wow that drobo is nice. A bit pricey at a thousand bucks, but that is the utlimate solution for sure. using firewire especially.

JT Thompson - 25 November 2008 07:13 PM

Wow that drobo is nice. A bit pricey at a thousand bucks, but that is the utlimate solution for sure. using firewire especially.

The Drobo itself isn’t $1000, its $349 (and usually you can find it cheaper online). That’s why I like this as a potential solution. Right now I have 4 external Hard drives of various sizes. For each one I paid between $200 & $400 bucks. Then I run out of space, so have to get a bigger and newer drive and there goes another $200-$400 bucks.

Whereas the Drobo you just get a standard hard drive for it. When you need more space you swap out a drive or two. The theory is that over time this would save money and be more convenient.

oh wow I must have not noticed the price i saw included drives.

Shoot I’d like to pick that up now if I had the extra $$. I’d put 4 1tb drives in. But probably start out with 2, so I can add on later.

That’s not a bad price AT ALL.

Thanks for linking that, I’m definitely going to get one soon as financial pressure lifts.

I bought a QNAP TS-209 Pro (2 x Mirrored 750Gb drives). It has 1Gb Ethernet and supports Jumbo Frames. I have about 60Gb of info on there now and it didn’t take long to transfer.

From there I backup online using Jungle Disk. It will take a while but I just got ADSL2 so it should take a little less time to fully backup.

My next move is how to create a Time Machine partition on there and then back that up too.