Hard Drives

[Chattonmill]

Now, having got my backup sorted......
I am starting to realise that my snap happy fingers mean that I need a lot of space on my hard drive at home.
The 250GB Maxtor hard drive is over half full and I know that I am taking more and more pictures.
I am looking at putting a 1TB drive in instead and quite fancy this.
BRAND NEW HITACHI 1TB 1000GB SATA DRIVE 7200 RPM on eBay (end time 26-Jul-09 17:18:06 BST)

Now I know nothing about this sort of thing, so if I did I would obviously have to back up my last drive and copy it onto the new one.
Would I have to do a complete new install of the operating system onto it?
If i did, could I just then copy the old contents on to the new one and everything would work, or would I have to reinstall everything?
Or would it just be better to get one of these?
Cyclone 1TB HDMI LAN Hard Drive Media Player & Recorder on eBay (end time 08-Aug-09 00:29:53 BST)
This seems a very versatile way of storing everything and playing and recording movies.
All comments welcome as usual, thanks for your patience!
Max

 

[whitenemesis]

Amazon are doing 2TB USB drives for approx £100. At that price you can't go far wrong!!

 

[Chattonmill]

I will have a look at that, every time the storage gets bigger the things you store do too!
I quite liked the second option for the recording potential, but thinking about it you would need the source to be on too, so that is not so good as I dont have Sky.
The playback option does make me thing it could be good though.
I have to decide whether it is just storage I want, I wish I wouldn't see these things, they just give me ideas!

 

[Roger Jones]

Just install it as a secondary hard drive. I assume the SATA system allows you to do this, just as I did with the IDE drives on my old system. If SATA is the same (I'm about to find out with a new system), then it's as simple as setting the jumpers on the secondary drive in slave mode (so that it is subordinated to your primary drive) and hooking it up with the connectors.

I've had a catastrophe with the primary drive on my old Dell 8200 machine. I am so glad that I got into the habit of putting all my precious stuff on the secondary drive.

 

[Chattonmill]

That sounds like a good idea, how do you go about that though, being a bit of a novice it sounds scary!

 

[nickcc101]

That sounds like a good idea, how do you go about that though, being a bit of a novice it sounds scary!

Just bought external drive housing off ebay £12 incl postage. Comes with all cables and USB 2.0 connections. Used spare 80gb ide drive and now have loads of spare storage.

 

[grober]

The problem of big drives is that they increase your ability to lose LOTS of data at one time. One advantage is that they tend to have fast access times---while the disc is fairly empty! SATA drives have individual connectors- usually 2 on the mother board- for a second internal SATA drive you may well have to buy a suitable cable since they are not usually supplied. 2 programs I have found very useful for juggling disc contents and creating backups new disc partitions dual boot systems etc are ACRONIS True Image Acronis backup software and recovery services in UK. Complete hard disk drive copy, cloning and image backup software: computer files and disk copying and Partition Magic Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 - Partitioning Software - Disk Partition
With these you can do almost anything with discs/contents

 

[Roger Jones]

If you don't want to go fiddling inside the computer, another option is to buy a hard-drive caddy/enclosure -- e.g. the Akasa Integral -- into which you can put either an old IDE or a new SATA drive and then plug the caddy into a USB port. That's what I've done with my old secondary IDE drive, which is now drive E: on my new SATA system and behaving perfectly.

Akasa Thermal Solution

Note: different enclosures for SATA and IDE.

I would second the recommendation of Acronis back-up software. Although it's on PC Pro's A-List

PC Pro: Product Reviews: A List

it still seems to me that even the best back-up software isn't as clear and easy to use as it could be.

I know Partition Magic and have used it a lot, but it may be a bit scary for a novice.

 

[Rory]

I know Partition Magic and have used it a lot, but it may be a bit scary for a novice.

Acronis have a partion tool - Disk Director - which I thought worked well. Never used anything else to compare it to though.

I like True Images's ability to clone drives, but it's blinking scary making sure you're doing it the right way round - it's really not totally obvious (to me, at least) which disk is which when you're going through the steps in the process.

 

[Roger Jones]

After a bit of Web research, I now understand that SATA (serial advanced technology attachment) drives work as one per connector, whereas you would have two IDE (integrated drive electronics) drives on the same ribbon cable. Also, SATA drives have no jumpers. Therefore, to install a secondary SATA drive is easier than IDE: connect the SATA cable to the second SATA slot that should be on your computer's mother board and that's it -- no jumpers, no fiddling with ribbon cables and those 40-pin plugs. The BIOS (basic input/output system) will already know which is the primary (boot) drive, so there's no fiddling to be done there either.

Sometimes "progress" is real.

 

[whitenemesis]

2 TB drive is 2 x 1TB so set as Raid 1 and double security

 

[petermansell]

Interesting thread. I understood about 5% of it. If I buy a big external hard drive with a usb and firewire connection couldn't I just use the backup option in Vista to backup all (software and data) on my PC? (Sorry if this is a highjack).

 

[Shude]

Interesting thread. I understood about 5% of it. If I buy a big external hard drive with a usb and firewire connection couldn't I just use the backup option in Vista to backup all (software and data) on my PC? (Sorry if this is a highjack).

Yes. IMHO you should only backup your data (try to keep everything in "my documents"). Even if you do backup your OS and applications you'll struggle to restore them (don't know much about Vista's backup but assume you'd have to be running Vista to restore! ) so as long as you have the original discs you're fine .

 

[A210AMG]

I've also been looking at drives,

I'm tempted to go for a Networked attached storage device or NAS drive. You can either buy a bare caddy and fit your own drive or buy them with drives in.

My reason for this is that I can attached it to the wireless router and then to the WD TV box connected to the TV.

Download and transfer pictures from my laptop to the drive as I sit in my chair...

Currently have some Freecom XXS 250gb USB drives (really small basically a laptop drive with a rubber sleeve on it. It also only needs USB no extra power) then currently have a 750GB drive attached to the WD TV box bit that isn't networked.


My money would be on a network sollution but thats what would suit our needs

 

[Deker]

2 TB drive is 2 x 1TB so set as Raid 1 and double security

2 x 1TB drives in RAID 1 will 'only' give 1TB, so if you need more that that either go RAID5 (if it takes 3 or more drives) or get 2 x 2TB drives. I'm guessing that the 2TB drive set up is in RAID0 which is faster but no security (lose any of the drives and you lose all of your data).

 

[Andre]

RAID 0 is striping (used for speed, no redundancy) RAID 1 is Mirroring, both drives carry same info so if one drive breaks the other has all the same data - very useful and IMO essential to anyone storing photos etc... so as above 2 x 1TB drives on RAID 1 = 2TB of drive space, 2 x1TB RAID 1 = 1TB of drive space.