phil_sugar Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 I have been using CD's to backup my images, but with a new SLR, and shooting raw, I need a larger method of storage. I am considering an external hard drive, perhaps in the 250 to 500 gig area. I would like some help on the following:1. Does it make much difference if I use USB2, Firewire 400 or Firewire 800?2. I have looked at the usual lineup by Seagate, Maxtor, LaCie, etc. but would like to know if anyone has some actual hands-on experience that can make some recommendations on these or other units.Thanks for the help.Phil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
billy_sprague Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 I am looking forward to the answer you get here as I am looking at the same thing, although for storing manipulated photoshop type files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mendonphoto Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 Sustained transfer rates (and that's what will matter when moving large files) for most hard drives will be the limiting factor. For my job, I tested an IDE hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port on a computer. It never even came close to maxing out the capability of a USB 2.0 connection. In fact, I think it was less than 100Mb/s. So, in short, it's very unlikely that any of those connection standards will gain you any sort of speed advantage over any other using an external hard drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaiyen Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 The flip side is that... about 2 years ago, Tom's hardware did a test with the (at the time) new Western Digital "special edition" drives, with the 8MB buffer. they slapped it into an external firewire case and, amazingly, found that it had slower performance that way than via the ATA/100 interface. Theoreticlaly, the firewire interface was slowing the drive down. Anyway - I actually agree that you won't see a major speed difference between the three interfaces. I routinely back up my 70GB of scanned images to a USB 2 drive, and it takes maybe 10 minutes, maybe 12. It's fast enough for a backup, certainly. I just bought a Maxtor 200GB drive and slapped it into an external usb2 case I got off ebay. I opted not to buy one of the pre-packaged external drives out there. allan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walterh Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 Phil if you just want to store data on the external disk (not frequently transfer data) then there is no real difference which interface you use. My personal preference would be USB2 if you want to use it on several computers - its more universal. If used (mostly) on a single computer with firewire I would settle for firewire, but its more of a personal preference because in my "environment" firewire gave me fewer problems. I would really watch for the quality of the "box" and its power supply, since this could be the weakest point in terms of safety. Of course if an external hard drive is a good way to "backup" data is another question. It certainly is a very cheap one with limited data safety. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phil_sugar Posted January 4, 2005 Author Share Posted January 4, 2005 Walter, I am interested in your comment about the safety of images stored on an external hard drive. Perhaps you could expand upon your comment, and if you have other suggestions about storage, please include them. Phil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mendonphoto Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 I'll jump in and answer that... Hard drives wear out, or get dropped and crash. A GOOD quality CD or DVD is a safer bet because there are no moving parts. But, I strongly emphasize the fact that it must be a good disk burned on a good drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark_scheuern Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 I archive onto external drives <I>and</I> CDs and/or DVDs. It's always safer to have multiple copies, preferably in different physical locations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chiswick_john Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 For storage speed is not that important - be aware that HD's with USB2 and Firewire are more expensive than those with single connections. With digital data storage multiple backups are essential - back up on DVD/CD AND an external HD and if you can afford it a 2nd external HD that you can store in another location. I've had problems with some cheap enclosures that you put HD's in. Another solution (if you have a PC) is the caddy type HD cases that you pull in and out of a spare 5.5" slot in your PC case - these are cheaper and more reliable than external drives ( its' basicaly a case that plugs into the IDE interface) and the transfer rate is faster as it's on the IDE bus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walterh Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 Phil - we all have this problem that hard drives are getting larger at low prices. This is great. However tape drives are getting larger but much slower. Also tape drives are still expensive. I would always prefer a tape drive for backup. The tape backup is safer - at reasonable prices the medium can be stored in multiple copies in different places and the media do not brake easy e.g. if dropped or scratched. even half a tape can be recovered. with half a disk or half a DVD you loose all data. a simple question can erase all your data on a hard disk by mistake: are you sure - yes! (oops wrong directory on wrong disk) On a tape there is a simple lock to prevent overwriting or accidental erasure ( along time ago some hard disks had switches to prevent writing). Its all a question of how valuable your images are. Its a no brainer with scanned film. If you loose all your images - tough "?$&%"$ and there you scan it all again. With digital cameras its a bigger problem. If the image is gone its gone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chiswick_john Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 "A GOOD quality CD or DVD is a safer bet because there are no moving parts" - but they can get scratched and delaminate if improperly stored and if you have a lot of data 4.7g is not very big let alone 650mb. There is no 100% safe medium against data loss but multiple copies on different media in different locations is as good as you need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robert goldstein Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 Storage requires only a single hard drive, but backup requires two. Hence, if you wish to store files on an external HD, you will need a second HD to back it up. Although this may not be the least expensive option, it is certainly the most convenient and efficient. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark_houlder2 Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 If your other components are up to it, firewire will give you a noticeable speed increase over USB2. I only have USB2 on my machine and it can be painfully slow (but then I'm used to networked hard drives, so go figure). However as mentioned, USB2 is more widespread... and if you're copying from a slow hard drive with an old processor etc etc you might not notice the difference. As for -safe- storage, i'd go for a hard drive over a CD any day. In my experience (10 years as a software developer) hard drives are less likely to go wrong and easier to deal with if they do go wrong; with a CD if it decides to suddenly be unreadable you're screwed. Hard drives can fail but not often at the expense of the data on them (at least not all in one go). They're also not much more expensive, if you're comparing with top quality CDs. At the risk of getting too technical, you may want to consider getting two (or more) identical hard drives and using them with a software RAID controller - this effectively duplicates the contents across both disks which can increase both security (in terms of not 'losing' the data) and performance, at the expense of, well, another hard disk :) not sure how easy it is to set up under windows, though... For the record I have a 250Gb lacie USB2 model which cost about a hundred quid; i'm happy with it, but it only gets very light usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mendonphoto Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 ...or, because they're just for backup, you could just get 2 hard drives and skip the hassle of RAID - especially for external drives. And, as I said before, no hard drive that you are going to buy for backup is going to even come close to stretching the capabilities of USB 2.0 or Firewire. You will not see any noticable improvement in performance from one to another for an external (IDE or SATA) hard drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scott_eaton Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 <I>The tape backup is safer</i><P>Tape units suffer MTF (mean time to failure rates) that are thousands of times higher than HD's, and tape units like Ultriums that have tolerable transfer rates cost insane amounts of money. I've replaced more tape drives in my carreer in IT than HD's, that's for sure. I also can't begin to list the number of times I've found stored tapes to be corrupted and non-readable.<P>I use external drives for network back-ups, and have found them quicker and more reliable than any other medium for doing such. They aren't as fast or efficient as an internal drive, but they are more convenient for quickly adding external storage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
test11664875106 Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 One of the possibilities is to building a storage server out of some old PC (that's what I'm about to do) running FreeBSD or Linux with software RADID-5 and Samba. Pick up 4 disks of reasonable size, use 1 for the system and 3 others for RAID-5 (you loose about 1/3 of the disk space but it's still cheaper than multiple DVDs, leave alone CDs. Disks don't have to be equal size, but partitions intended for RAID-5 array has to be identical. If one of those disks breaks, you simple substitute it without need to manually restore any data. This way you have an external (relatively to your imaging workstation) storage, which you won't move often, accessible instantly over native Windows networking. 3x250GB disks will give you 500GB of usable disk space on RAID5. If you manage to stick additional disk controller to your machine and have enough chassis space you can improve % of usable space by adding more disks to the array. Of course, the problem is that in case of fire in your house storage server can go to hell with your images, but so are CD's and tapes if you store them at home. This can be worked around in various ways from exchanging servers with your friends to finding some hosting space at commercial location providers or may be in your university. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soboyle www.oboylephoto.co Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 I have to put in a recommendation for the Maxtor One touch firewire/USB drives, works very well, quiet, and comes with Retrospect backup software so you can duplicate your data from your working drives easily and quickly. I feel a lot better having my data copied to one of these drive, as well as backing up on DVD by project. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bumeister Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 I can second Scott's comments on tape drives. As a long-time data center unix guy, I have seen way more tape drive failures than hard drive failures. In the environment I support, we have many thousands of hard drives spinning for months at a time, and I doubt we lose more than one or two every 6-8 weeks. For the typical home user, tape drives are just not practical. The drives and necessary media are expensive and unreliable compared to HD storage. Unless of course you have a StorageTek tape library and a support account... I have a firewire 400 external drive that's plenty fast enough, USB 2 should be fast enough for you as well. I'm ultra-paranoid, so I have copies of my images all over the damn place: external drive, both internal drives, and DVDs. All drives are Seagates, although the external is re-branded from Other World Computing. I use a Pioneer SuperDrive to burn the DVDs. It can be a PITA to keep everything synched, but with decent backup software (or a cron job and a script) it's not too bad. If you're ultra-ultra-paranoid, you might have some sort of RAID setup between internal disks, or maybe a G-RAID box, and you would store your DVDs somewhere offsite so the house fire you will inevitably suffer won't get all your images... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tim_hodges Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 Hi I have a Maxtor External Drive to back up my files. the maxtor has two advantages 1. With its Retrospect backup software it backs up your data at a touch of a button 2. It backs up data incrementally so it only takes a few minutes depending on how many new files are created since the last backup. INMHO there is no need for Raid as stored images are static by nature unlike commercial operational programs that are constantky in use. The ideal situation is to have two external drives and keep one in a smal fireproof safe and swap the two around at regular intervals. I now sleep well at night! Hope this helps rgds Tim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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