[BC] Portable Hard Drives

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Warning: External USB and Firewire drives are usually the cheapest, crapiest IDE drives with a power supply and protocol converter board. The power supplies are generally wall-warts nowadays, and the protocol converter boards are built to the lowest possible cost, meaning that their lifetime is even shorter than the drives.

Many try to use these for backups. My advice is don’t use them at all. Instead, get some halfway decent serial-ATA drives and temporarily install one, format it and backup everything to it. Then remove the drive, put it is a labeled box and then do the next machine with another drive. 

I used to take my work home on external USB drives. I thought it was “neat” until I lost one, then the next one, then… That is when I started to use one of those “unreliable” “pen” drives that plugs into an USB socket. Of course, you can’t back up an entire system on one because they are not large enough (yet), but they are much more reliable than external USB or Firewire drives.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/

----- Original Message -----

On Monday 08 June 2009 06:18 am, Ernie Belanger wrote:
>  Has anyone had experience with either the Toshiba  or Western Digital 
>  External Hard drives?
>  
>  I can get a 500GB Toshiba for About $100 or a 1TB Western Digital for 
>  $119. It's not the size I'm concerned with but the reliability.