backup drive advice

Jay_S · Post by **Jay_S** » Fri May 26, 2006 6:07 am

I need some advice. I need a backup hard drive for my recently completed flac server. It's an older Dell P3 with only IDE and USB1. I have a 250gb IDE drive in it now. I would ideally like an external usb drive for backups and because I can unplug it when I don't need it. The slow x-fer speed of USB1 isn't much of a concern because I'll only be using it for incremental backups of music files - I don't really care how long it takes.

My second computer is the one in my sig - mainly used for quiet gaming these days. It is pretty quiet (the nv silencer is the loudest thing in there when the hd is at idle). It has a 200 gig IDE seagate (suspended, still audible seeks, but love the warranty). My motherboard has sata and sata2 headers. I do not really care about backups on this machine since it's only used for gaming.

I'm trying to decide between the following options:
1) buy a pre-built external USB hard drive and be done with it (typically expensive at 200+ gb capacities).
2) buy a brand new sata drive for the gaming pc, and put its old IDE drive in a external enclosure for server backups.

I'm leaning toward option 2, because:
1) it might be the cheapest - I don't have to buy a big sata drive since all my audio is on the server.
2) a sata drive in the gaming pc would certainly simplify cable routing.

For around $50, I like this seagate 80 gb drive. Although they're not the quietest drives out there, I rarely notice mine when gaming.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jay

nici · Post by **nici** » Fri May 26, 2006 6:51 am

DonÂ´t know about the states but in Finland a 250Gb sata drive is about 95â‚¬ and a USB drive of the same size is about 120â‚¬. HDD prices have come down quite a lot in the last few months.. best Gb/$ ratio is on 300Gb drives now i think.

Obviously the most simple solution would be to get a USB drive, i would get this one for 125$. I have two of those and they work quite well, have transfer rates of over 20MB/s with USB 2.0 and are actually very quiet

Seagate drives in both of mine at least. They get slightly warm pretty fast, so heat transfer to the aluminuim enclosure works.

Also keep in mind that a USB enclosure will cost 20-45$, so the difference in prize between your options is about 45$ or so. Option 1 being more simple and option 2 being cheaper(if you get the 80Gb drive). You get a longer warranty for the drive if you get a separate HDD though.

Le_Gritche · Post by **Le_Gritche** » Fri May 26, 2006 7:06 am

Jay_S wrote:For around $50, I like this seagate 80 gb drive. Although they're not the quietest drives out there, I rarely notice mine when gaming.

Any thoughts?

IDE and SATA Seagate's HDDs are not the same. Seagate doesn't use adjustable AAM, so they set up the IDE drives for silence, and the SATA drives for performance.
For their 7200.7 line, this resulted in faster but noisier seeks on the SATA product line than on the IDE line. I guess it's the same with the 7200.9 line.
Look at that thread for various user feelings about the 7200.9 SATA.

Buying a new drive for your gamng rig will expose you to the risk of being unhappy about its noise, whereas you seem fine with your current HDD ("If it's not broken, don't fix it !").
On the other hand, you mention the cable routing simplification and the money factor. There also the possibility to use the SATA drive in a future gaming computer where IDE ports would be fewer or discontinued altogether.

Jay_S · Post by **Jay_S** » Fri May 26, 2006 11:20 am

Le_Gritche wrote: Look at that thread for various user feelings about the 7200.9 SATA.

Yes - I have read that thread. It seems hit or miss with the 7200.9 drives - some people like them and some hate them.

The Samsung HD160JJ has also caught my eye. I like Seagate mainly for their warranty, but Samsung has a pretty good reputation around here for noise and their 3-year warranty isn't so bad.

T.J.(iceman) · Post by **T.J.(iceman)** » Fri May 26, 2006 3:37 pm

Im looking at a backup drive myself. and i found Raidsonic/Icybox enclosures
perfect for my use. Its Fanless, It uses USB 2.0 And/or firewire and it looks cool. The drive is silent so i cant hear it either.

Found a picture

Raygers · Post by **Raygers** » Fri May 26, 2006 5:04 pm

I do a lot of Family history work with my computer, so I am paranoid about losing imformation that has taken me many years to amass.
What I decided upon after some thought, was an internal removable drive. I went IDE because I had a couple of drives sitting around. I bought a drive case and an extra tray, that, together with Cobian backup, backs up my work every night whether I remember or not. And it's always in the computer and not taking up a space on my desk. I switch drives about once a month with the other one that resides off site.

Just another option

Ray

And to keep it silent, I pulled the internal fan out

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Sat May 27, 2006 6:10 am

Raygers wrote: And to keep it silent, I pulled the internal fan out

Assuming that this thing is running for any extended period of time, you'll want to keep an eye on your HDD's temps. They may well be higher than you'd expect.

Raygers · Post by **Raygers** » Sat May 27, 2006 6:16 am

Actualy it's the coolest of all my internal drives. It's mounted inside of an Aluminum case and the airflow through the, now empty, fan hole is not too bad. The drive is at 27C whereas the others are in the mid 30s.

Ray

Post by **CA_Steve** » Sat May 27, 2006 7:44 am

Get an internal HDD and put it in an enclosure...

Internal drives have 3-5yr warranties while external drives tend to have 1 yr warranties.

Jay_S · Post by **Jay_S** » Mon May 29, 2006 11:20 am

CA_Steve wrote:Get an internal HDD and put it in an enclosure...

Internal drives have 3-5yr warranties while external drives tend to have 1 yr warranties.

Exactly my thinking - it's cheaper to build your own and you get a better warranty. Why do prepackaged external USB hard drives have shorter warranty periods? Because of the excessive spin up/down cycles?

Jay

Post by **CA_Steve** » Mon May 29, 2006 7:48 pm

cheap power supplies.

Jay_S · Post by **Jay_S** » Tue May 30, 2006 4:38 am

Ok, I'm going with option 2 - last night I bought the following:

1) SAMSUNG SpinPoint P Series 160GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb hard drive

2) A cheap (with decent customer reviews) Aluminum USB2 enclosure

Jay

ultraboy · Post by **ultraboy** » Tue May 30, 2006 5:19 am

Jay_S wrote:...Exactly my thinking - it's cheaper to build your own and you get a better warranty. Why do prepackaged external USB hard drives have shorter warranty periods? Because of the excessive spin up/down cycles?

I believe it's because of the external HDD with USB does not spin down at all, unless you turn it off. I used to have my back up HDD in an external USB box, but after having dead back up HDDs twice in less than 2 years

I decided to change my data back up plan.

Right now back up HDD for my PC stays in my son's PC. With LAN connection I used Syncback to keep that back up drive regularly updated. This way if anything goes badly wrong on my PC, the back up files should be safe. Or if thing goes wrong with my son's PC then the original is still safe and I can rebuild the back up easily. Have been doing this for 6+ months now, and very happy indeed.

May be with the e-Sata I can do it differently. But my 2 yrs old MB doesn't support e-Sata so it's a mute point ...for now.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Tue May 30, 2006 5:25 am

Fanless enclosure, eh? Hopefully, there will be decent thermal conductivity through the aluminum case...

If the temps get too high, look at the AMS Venus. A tad pricer, but the P-ATA version works fine for me.

Jay_S · Post by **Jay_S** » Tue May 30, 2006 7:15 am

CA_Steve wrote:Fanless enclosure, eh? Hopefully, there will be decent thermal conductivity through the aluminum case...

Yeah, we'll see about temps. Many of the newegg reviews say the enclosure gets pretty warm, but I suppose that's just the aluminum case doing its job. Initially the device will see a massive amt of work copying all the music currenty on the server. But after that, I'll just plug it in occasionally to backup any albums I've ripped since the last backup. So after the initial copy session, it's workload will be minimal and hopefully heat won't be a problem.

ultraboy wrote:Right now back up HDD for my PC stays in my son's PC. With LAN connection ...

I wanted to do something similar, but my server is running linux and my gaming pc is on WinXP. It shouldn't be much trouble to get them to network with each other, but for the life of me I cannot get them to see each others shared folders. I'm a total linux noob however, and at this point I've probably caused more harm than good trying to set it up.

I'm happy with an external drive/enclosure. This way I can bring my library with me to friends houses, work, etc.

Jay

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Tue May 30, 2006 7:29 am

ultraboy wrote: But my 2 yrs old MB doesn't support e-Sata...

On the Asrock site, there's a blurb: (the K8NF4G-SATA2) is the first mobo to support eSATA!!! Whoopee! So I looked at my mobo, looking for the eSATA connector. There isn't one. Read the manual. No eSATA connector.

Googled "eSATA" and did some reading.

eSATA is about shielded SATA connectors and signal wires, beginning at the PC case and ending at the external drive case. There is no such thing as an eSATA connector on a mobo or on a SATA(2) drive.

Whether your or my mobo "supports" eSATA is a moot point.

ultraboy · Post by **ultraboy** » Tue May 30, 2006 11:50 am

Felger Carbon wrote:...eSATA is about shielded SATA connectors and signal wires, beginning at the PC case and ending at the external drive case. There is no such thing as an eSATA connector on a mobo or on a SATA(2) drive.

Whether your or my mobo "supports" eSATA is a moot point.

he..he..You're right, of course.

I guess what I was trying to say is that my MB does not have the eSATA connector readily available like this. And since this eSATA connector is designed to withstand 5000+ pluging/unpluging instead of 50 for normal L shape internal SATA cable, it would be good for using it as an external HDD connector.

nici · Post by **nici** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 12:59 pm

In my opinion the normal sata connector should be banned by law.. I always seem to break them within a few months.

And as for storage, my files are now on a 750Gb RAID5 array in a buffalo TeraStation and iÂ´ve ordered some hot-swap sata enclosures(~30â‚¬) for backups and will burn digital pictures and other very importatnt data to DVDs so i think im safe..

The terastation is great except for one thing, even with gigabit LAN the transfer speed is very slow.. Anyone know a program i can test transfer speed of NAS? HDtach only does local drives.

Jay_S · Post by **Jay_S** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 12:18 pm

New parts came in -

1) SAMSUNG SpinPoint P 160GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb hard drive
2) A cheap (with decent customer reviews) Aluminum USB2 enclosure

Thoughts and setup issues:

Before beginning I decided to simplify the XP installation by slipstreaming SP2 into my original XP Pro disk. This was remarkably easy to do, and I regret not doing it a long time ago.

As mentioned before, I was never able to easily establish access to my linux server from my winXP machine (although that changed today, more below). So I had to backup everything I wanted to save to cd. This included mp3's, photos, office work and game saves - all told, approx 7 cd's. Not too bad.

The 939dual-sata2 motherboard has both sata1 and sata 2 headers, and since the samsung drive is sata2 compatible, I might as well use the sata2 header. This requires various JMicron drivers and files to be copied to a floppy & the usual F6 during windows installation.

The only floppy drive I have at home is in my linux server, a dell optiplex, wedged right on top (as in - very hard to get out). I downloaded and copied the required files to the first floppy I found. It took a while to figure out how to physically remove the drive (stupid dell cases), but I finally got it out and rigged it up handing out of the side of my pc case.

Installed new samsung - very easy of course. Being SATA I was able to clean up the cables a little bit.

Insert XP installation disk & reboot. Wait for the message, F6. I get to the part where the installer asks for the floppy to load scsi (I thinks its a scsi device, not a sata...), and the disk fails. Jesus. Turn off computer, turn off server, reinstall floppy in server, copy files to a 2nd floppy - TEST THEM, eject, reinstall floppy in XP machine, reboot & reinstall windows. Sucess finally. Lotta headache though.

After all this is up and running, I mounted the old pata seagate in the new external USB enclosure. Plugged it in to the server and it immediately mounted everything and started trying to boot! Canceled that. All files are there, great - I guess I didn't need to backup everything to CD afterall.

Using Gparted partitioning program within linux I removed all logical and actual partitions, created and formated a FAT32 partition. This finished way to quickly, and as suspected the drive wouldn't mount and I get some error messages. Ok, lets try linux filesystems - back to Gparted, delete Fat32 partition, make ext2 partition. Still didn't work. Took drive out of external enclosure, installed internally as slave on ide1 - STILL didn't work. What the? Giving up.

So I finally took the time to get samba set up correctly, and now I can xfer files to/from the linux machine to the winXP machine.

The seagate goes back into the external enclosure, and I used winXP disk manager to delete all partitions and reformat to NTFS. This works finally. Now, to back up my server, I have to bring the files from the linux machine over the network to the USB hd attached to the winXP machine.

A little complicated, but it's working. I REALLY wish linux could write to NTFS mounts.

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