Quiet backup solution?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Ber
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 12:46 pm

Quiet backup solution?

Post by Ber » Wed Aug 13, 2008 8:06 pm

Hi, guys. I'm looking for a quiet but reasonably speedy (so I actually use it regularly) way to back up my PCs. I have one 37+120GB PC, one 320GB, and soon will have a laptop w/a 160GB drive, so total storage space should be 640GB+. This is a fairly new aspect of computing for me, and a lot of what I found's sort of old, so I'd really appreciate suggestions. Thanks! :)

aSASa
Posts: 130
Joined: Fri May 16, 2008 12:54 pm
Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Post by aSASa » Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:04 pm

Well, to be simple, you could get a single WD6400AAKS. 640GB, high density, silent.

Its also very cheap. Only $85 shipped at www.newegg.com.

And don't forget, formatting. You actually have

320+160+120+37=637GB

637-6.25%*=597.2GB.

This means that the other single drive will be just a few mb's extra over your other 4.

Seems like a good choice to me.

*6.25% is an estimate of formatting losses. Actual losses are just a tad higher. Also note that losses isn't really the right word. There never was 640GB on the drive, but hard drive manufacturers count gigabytes as 1000MB instead of the realistic 1024MB.

Ber
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 12:46 pm

Post by Ber » Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:08 am

Putting that in a spare drive bay and backing up over the network would make the hardware simple, but it seems the software side could be complicated if I need to restore an HDD image over the network. Can you recommend any network drive enclosures?

mrCow
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Aug 05, 2008 3:10 pm
Location: New-Zealand

Post by mrCow » Thu Aug 14, 2008 2:17 pm

I can recommend the Western Digital My Book, World Edition 1tb. It's an NAS, and very quiet. Since it is composed of two 500 gig drives, it can be configured as a 1tb volume or 2x 500gig. Also comes with software for remote access and backup.

Be warned that transferring over 100 base-T is very slow, so you can't be in a rush to backup or retrieve anything unless you have gigabit networking or use the USB2 or firewire port. I believe there's a model with e-sata too.

aztec
Posts: 443
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:01 am
Location: Foster City, CA

Post by aztec » Thu Aug 14, 2008 7:09 pm

Have you considered a NAS solution?

Dlink DNS-323 get smy vote.

You can put it on sleep mode as well.

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