On Jun 26, 2005, at 16:33, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At 03:55 PM -0400 06/26/2005, Daniel wrote:
Are any hard drive manufacturers significantly better than others
today? I want to get a Firewire drive, and looking at Pricewatch I
see 250GB Hitachi units for ~$120. How's Hitachi? Do ALL Hitachi
drives have the annoying seek feature? What about Western Digital,
Seagate, and others?
I've had reasonably good luck with all manufacturers, except WD.
I strongly recommend staying away from the really big drives, esp the
200 GB and bigger. They have impressive MTBF ratings, but seem to die
too soon in actual use.
YMMV.
Yes, I noticed where you said that in the earlier thread. I may stick
to 160GB for just that reason.
I plan on buying two for the purposes of backing up my systems. Two
will allow me to have a rotating backup - I'll switch the drives
weekly.
I'm really buying this to back up only my iMac (80GB HD; 65GB used),
but practically I'll back up the PowerBook (80GB HD; 60 GB used) ...
and also my other systems (various PowerMacs and other things), but
those are all miniscule compared to the iMac and PowerBook.
How much of that is OS/apps - which really don't need to be backed up
regularly or even at all?
On my iMac, /Users is 49GB; this includes a ~2,200 song iTunes library
and a ~4,000 photo iPhoto library. On my PowerBook, /Users is 47GB
with the same iTunes library but no iPhoto library.
On a monthly basis, how much of the user data is "new"?
Probably not too much. My daily backups would be incremental of
course; I would only do full backups weekly, perhaps even only monthly.
Once you do a full backup, you only need to backup the new data
thereafter. If that new data is only a few gigs here and there,
DVD-RW ($1/disc, 25c/GB) or DVD-R (50c/disc, 12.5c/GB), will be more
cost effective than a HD (SATA's are down to 50 or 60c/GB). AND by
using removable medias instead of a HD, you're 1) not writing over
previously backed up data, so you can go back and 2) more convenient
to off-site them.
Yes, I have thought of that. The PowerBook I use is never backed up,
though it really should be, at least once in a while. It is my
employer's machine, but there's a lot of personal data on here too. My
original plan was to keep one drive at work and one at home. Every
Monday I would switch the drives, which would provide me with offsite
backup for each location.
Currently I do back up my Quicken data, but that's it. My life would
fall apart (or nearly so) were I to lose that, so I'm pretty fanatical
about backing it up. (My Quicken data is the only thing I back up; I
use the prayer method for everything else.) Except for my iTunes
purchases, the loss of the rest of it would merely be an inconvenience.
And you're right - once the first backup is written, I could certainly
do incremental backups to removable media. But I have no idea where
you get DVD-Rs for that price. The Apple Store charged $8 for 5 DVD-Rs
last time I bought them. At that price, I don't go through them very
often.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Daniel
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