Are there cases for long-term HD storage?

[PresterJohn]

>I have a extra IDE card with the cable going out a slot on the back

imo, regularly messing around with a bare drive like that isn;t a good idea. it's a cheap solution, but you need to be plenty careful.

personally, i would use a tape backup if you want to store data off-site.

[MikeGn]

Quote:

Originally posted by ziggie
I have a extra IDE card with the cable going out a slot on the back and if needed, i just plug one on the cable and use it as ness and un-plug it again. almost forgot, i make up a long power plug also to use for it....matter of fact, sometimes i plug a couple of HD's into it.

Let me ask you this: How would this protect your data from fire?

I'm beginning to think that the only safe enough way to virtually stop any risk of data loss is to do daily or bi-weekly backups to a second hard drive (which would be kept unplugged when not in use), and do backups to DVDs (kept off-site) once or twice a month. I was hoping to not have to spend $400 or $500 (~$200 for the DVD drive, $100 - $200 for the HD, and long-term costs for the DVD-RAM disks themselves) for a backup solution, though.

Regards,
Mike Gnitecki

[PresterJohn]

>How would you transport a hard drive in such a way that there's a 0% chance it'll come into contact with a magnetic field?

if you store it in your car trunk (provided you don't have any stereo equipment there) it should be safe enough during transport.

>I have researched external drives, but I've found them to be too unreliable. Look up any external drive that's been out at least a few months, and you'll find numerous reports of data loss.

and yet, you're proposing to use a standard ide drive and moving that about instead? i'll take a modern, external drive over your choice any day.

[MikeGn]

Quote:

and yet, you're proposing to use a standard ide drive and moving that about instead? i'll take a modern, external drive over your choice any day.

No, the drive would stay in the computer case. As far as I know, connecting and disconnecting an IDE cable once or twice a week isn't dangerous.

These external drives may be "modern", but they're not a safe place for data. I don't think that it's the hard drives themselves per se, but rather something relating to the firewire interface or whatever software (firmware?) the external drives use. The problem with the drives isn't outright failure. It's more along the lines of files (many at a time) disappearing.

Regards,
Mike Gnitecki

[PresterJohn]

>The problem with the drives isn't outright failure. It's more along the lines of files (many at a time) disappearing.

this makes absolutely no sense nor do i find it credible.

from personal experience, i know of 3-4 people using external fireware drives w/o any data loss whatsoever. one of them is even using it as a storage device for a soho webserver and it's been fine for nearly a year now.

well, you can do what you want. imo, a tape solution would be the most flexible and trouble free, particularly if your data to be backed up is sizeable. if it's small, you could back it up to an optical device but it will be much slower.

[MikeGn]

Quote:

this makes absolutely no sense nor do i find it credible.

"It has instead proven to be unreliable and unstable. I've lost data, had it freeze up my system, had it cause conflicts with other firewire devices, and had it corrupt files and/or misplace parts of the file structure. The drive has so many problems that I connect it only when absolutely necessary." -- From review on a Maxtor external Firewire drive

"Shortly after I bought a second one, which worked at first, then became very flaky. It turned out that the external power supply was defective. Maxtor replaced the power supply after some delay...drive began to make peculiar noises and would lock up. Fortunately, I was able to copy the contents on this drive to the newest one. Then, a few days later the second drive began to develop the same symptoms and I bought a fourth drive (from another manufacturer) to attempt to save my data. At present the second drive works for awhile, then locks up. So far so good on the third drive. In summary, just out of warranty two out of three of the drives have failed." -- From review on a Maxtor external Firewire drive

"I bought one of these about a year ago and it only worked for about 3 weeks before it started going bad. The hard drive would spin down every few minutes unpredictably. When this happened when I was writing to it I got a lot of data loss of course. As I discovered later the power to the drive was not consistent. I pulled the drive out of the ... enclosure they had it in and put in my PC directly (it came formatted FAT-32) and it worked fine. There were two boards in the enclosure, an firewire to ide bridge board and one for distributing power from the external power supply. It turns out the board for the power supply is defective. I suspect there's a bad capacitor on that board, that's why it fails periodically. Geez these guys couldn't have spent a couple more cents and shipped the thing with more reliable components? ... I ripped out the bridge board and hard drive and have them inside an old scsi enclosure and it seems to work fine." -- From review on a Maxtor external Firewire drive

"1. Not reliable. Sometimes it just don't wake up and I can't access the data...I am so sick of this drive I end up took it apart and put the HHD inside my PC as internal. It works but the speed is slow." -- From review on a Maxtor external Firewire drive

"It died just after my warranty was up. Never had a hard drive only last a year." -- From review on a Western Digital external Firewire drive

Is that enough, or should I post more? Bottom line, I just don't think that external drives are reliable enough.

Regards,
Mike Gnitecki

[PresterJohn]

a lot of nameless reviews don't impress me. like i said, i know 4 people who use 'em w/o any problems. one of them is a graphic artist and uses it on a daily basis to transport files from home to office and back again.

and if you read my previous posts again, i recommend using a tape solution for off-site .

[Jeordiewhite]

There is another way to protect your self, RAID 5. It's generally secure.
IMHO I do think that listening to other peoples stories of stuff going bad isn't a good reason to not even consider the stuff, unless you have a reliable source that the product isn't good.
what about the people who had this stuff work for them?

[PresterJohn]

>what about the people who had this stuff work for them?

exactly.

just go to the hd forum here and you find people who've had problems with brand X drives dying and swear off them. yet countless others are running brand X fine and post that they would by them again. btw, brand X was not ibm.

raid 5 is indeed safer but he was looking at an off-site solution. 'sides, raid5 doesn't safeguard your data in event of fire or theft...

[MikeGn]

Quote:

a lot of nameless reviews don't impress me. like i said, i know 4 people who use 'em w/o any problems. one of them is a graphic artist and uses it on a daily basis to transport files from home to office and back again.

I see. So I'm a liar, because I post information that counteracts your ill informed view? I personally wouldn't base my viewpoint on a product based on how four friends appear to view it. The device could have a 24% failure rate, but you would keep on saying that it's 100% reliable.

I'm going to drop the debate at this point. This whole thing reminds me of an interesting letter exchange I once saw in a newspaper. Someone had written in and casually mentioned that a certain American car was unreliable. Another invividual took great offense and wrote a long letter detailing his experience with the car, and that of two friends. He concluded that the car was reliable, and that the original letter writer was wrong or had an agenda. Someone else replied to that second letter, though, with actual stats and other information (Consumer Reports, etc) that proved that the original letter writer was in fact correct. The newspaper stopped publishing letters on that topic after the third letter, but I have little doubt that the second letter writer wrote in a scathing response to that third letter. Sometimes you just can't convince people of certain things. They'll go along praising the product until it personally hurts them. Then they'll quickly change sides. Thus, I doubt that any proof will result in you changing your mind at this point in time. I'm going to stop replying to any further posts on this thread that are about external hard drives.

Regards,
Mike Gnitecki