Best Backup Drive for the Money?

[NealF]

I'm thinking of getting a backup drive, maybe 1 or 2 TB, just for backing up my sample libraries. Any recommendations for something reliable without breaking the bank?

Thanks.

[NealF]

Anybody?

[dix]

I've used a Nexstar SATA drive dock with 1TB WD-Black drives for backup for quite awhile and never had a problem.

[mikehalloran]

Nearly impossible to answer. FW and USB drives with less than perfect power supplies have been causing lots of trouble lately - especially waking up from sleep. I have had three go south on me in the last two months. The drives inside, however, are great.

I am starting to think that it's Glyph - as expensive as they are...

[HCMarkus]

I'd recommend any firewire or USB2 external that works with one important caveat: Get two of them.

Rotate the two drives regularly as your Time Machine drives. I keep my second drive offsite to provide disaster protection. Also, if you buy two of the same type and a power supply fails, you have a backup.

I run a standard PC power supply to power some old enclosures with dead power supplies. Easy to do, and you can run a whole bunch of external drives from the least expensive PC power supply.

[NealF]

Thanks.

[dosuna11]

I'd recommend any firewire or USB2 external that works with one important caveat: Get two of them.

Rotate the two drives regularly as your Time Machine drives. I keep my second drive offsite to provide disaster protection. Also, if you buy two of the same type and a power supply fails, you have a backup.

I run a standard PC power supply to power some old enclosures with dead power supplies. Easy to do, and you can run a whole bunch of external drives from the least expensive PC power supply.

Is there a link to look at one of these?

[rhythm_kitchen]

Avoid a plastic enclosure as the screws will strip and it takes 30 minutes to swap a drive. The 'Pro Monsoon' enclosures are aluminum USD $34.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/EZ%20Quest/N27300/

Decent enclosure for SATA 3.5" drives (will boot a Mac w/ SuperDuper clone). WD Caviar Blue (not Black) will run cooler as this unit has no fan.

Crappy Firewire 400 to 400 cable enclosed with Pro Monsoon unit doesn't fit snugly into Apple's 1394a jack. BTW it is an Oxford Chipset w/ both USB-2 type A and 1394a, 6 pin.

You should snag a 1394a to b cable:

Firewire, http://www.granitedigital.com

USB-2, http://www.kimber.com

(or an OWC cable then hit Fry's or Radioshack for clamp-on ferrite beads).

The brick (transformer) is auto switching from 220 to 120, 50 or 60 cycle and the power connector is decent.

[mikehalloran]

>Decent enclosure for SATA 3.5" drives (will boot a Mac w/ SuperDuper clone). WD Caviar Blue (not Black) will run cooler as this unit has no fan.<

If using it for Time Machine only, the WD Green is my favorite. It also makes the Apple Time Capsule run much, much cooler keeping the power supplies from overheating (known issue). Otherwise, I agree on the Blue. My Time Capsules went from 'too hot to the touch' to 'barely warm' after I replaced the stock 1/2G drives with WD 2T Green. They're older than the Seagate drives below and still quiet and reliable. The Apple drives found new homes in G5 and MacPro computers.

Avoid the Seagate "green" drives. Although I have not had one fail (yet?), they get noisy with loud grinding on startup and clicking noises when they run. As long as they still work, Seagate will not replace them under the 5 warranty. There are many thousands of complaints - so much so that Seagate lowered the warranty from 5 years down to 1 or 2. I am using mine in an open dock only for Time Machine in non-critical situations.

[rhythm_kitchen]

You can probably run a WD Caviar Blue for 2 hours but not any longer IMHO. Dang enclosure gets hot.

SuperDuper clones can take a long long time. However I am unsure if they will boot Lion. G-5s not all chipsets will boot (Oxford 934 will).

If the WD Green drives run even cooler go for it. Often Best Buy sells buggy firmware older Seagate drives but not version 12s or higher. Amazon too sells these 'discounted' older Barracudas.

WD tech posted that the Black and Blue drives are identical but the driver is tuned to run quieter with a reduced seek time.

I wish I knew the pin numbers to set the Caviars to 'read only' as this way regardless of a driver error your backups are secure (even if motor fails you can send it out to data rescue).

+ 1 to use as many of these as possible (not just one backup).

I have dual partitions on my sample drive as it is 1 tB. Keeping my online backup on there.

[HCMarkus]

I'd recommend any firewire or USB2 external that works with one important caveat: Get two of them.

Rotate the two drives regularly as your Time Machine drives. I keep my second drive offsite to provide disaster protection. Also, if you buy two of the same type and a power supply fails, you have a backup.

I run a standard PC power supply to power some old enclosures with dead power supplies. Easy to do, and you can run a whole bunch of external drives from the least expensive PC power supply.

Is there a link to look at one of these?

One of what?

[mikehalloran]

OWC is now recommending the WD Green drives only for enclosures without fans.

My only issue with them is for DP and other high performance applications where you want the drive to be at 100% performance all the time. For those, you want Blue or Black and an enclosure with a fan - the inside of a MacPro, for example.

I have a Black running in an open dock where there is no housing and it seems to be doing ok. This dock does not wake up the HD properly when connected by USB but performs properly connected via eSATA. I have another housing that used to work fine USB, FW and eSATA but no longer wakes up my drives in any mode.

OWC sells unloaded FW, eSATA and USB drive enclosures. Micro Center and many others do also but, with OWC, I feel more comfortable if warranty becomes an issue.

[dosuna11]

Hey HC, Standard PC power supply for bad drive power supplies.

[HCMarkus]

Hey HC, Standard PC power supply for bad drive power supplies.

From an old post; hope this helps. The Antec is currently powering four external drives in two OWC cases, and going strong:

Re: External HD recommendations....
by HCMarkus » Tue Sep 29, 2009 5:10 pm

I bought a PC Power supply ($40) and used it to replace a failed supply on an OWC case. Worked great, and I can power 6 externals or more with this single supply as my various outboard supplies fail.

Here's how I did it:

I went to Fry's after doing a little web hunting for compatible External HD supplies without much success. Since my enclosure holds two drives, more power was required than a typical single-drive enclose supply would provide. Fry's had nothing either, untiI came up with the idea of buying an inexpensive PC Power Supply (Antec Basiq, 430 Watts for $40.00) and surgically attaching the old power supply connector/wire via Molex connector to the new supply. Works like a charm, and when my second OWC (or any of my other external drive's) power supply dies, I will simply power the enclosures from my new switching supply. Plenty of power here to give a boost to all my external drives at once. My drives are now humming along nicely.

Here's a good site with info that came in handy: http://web2.murraystate.edu/andy.batts/ ... supply.htm

I didn't get as fancy as this guy, just soldered a few wires together. The load resistor is not necessary when driving HDs, as they provide the load necessary for the supply to function. Just make sure you get the pin out right (it varies from external enclosure to enclosure - even similar enclosures from different production runs can have different pin outs - check the power supply that came with the enclosure for pin out), and don't forget to jumper the green wire to ground (any Black wire), 'cause the supply won't operate unless you do. Yellow wires provide 12 volts. Red provide 5 volts. You don't need the 3.3 volt (Orange) wire to be hooked up. If you really want to make it simple, and if your enclosure is fanless, just drill a hole in the enclosure and directly hook up one of the SATA power plugs that come pre=attached on modern power supplies to your drive.

Another idea is to simply buy a standard computer case with built-in SATA power and fans and mount all your eSATA drives therein. Run eSATA cables to your Mac. Takes up more vertical space, but way cheaper than multiple small enclosures. Also better cooling.

[daniel.sneed]

Wow! Thanks for sharing, Markus.
I'll reconsider external drives questions.