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External Drive Help

Hi All,

I had a surprise yesterday when my external drive - a Western Digital 1TB My Passport suddenly refused to recognise certain of my music folders (high-res and DSD downloads). I also received an error message - cyclic redundance check. Fortunately after running tools and check disk, the drive started working again and I re-imported the missing music files in JRiver.

This external drive is connected to my Baetis Server and plays music (mainly CDs ripped to FLAC using DB Poweramp) through the JRiver software. However, I am also starting to download more music over the web and this issue got me thinking as to how I might improve my back up system as these downloads have no physical media back up like a CD.

Currently as per Baetis` recommendations, I rip music to a separate external drive on my laptop using DB Poweramp or I download directly from websites like HD Tracks - in each case this music is transferred to My Passport External Drive. In addition, every time I download new music I manually copy across these files to a Seagate 4TB back-up hard drive.

Do you think I could be doing anything better in terms of handling files? I suspect it becomes a matter of how much redundancy I am prepared to pay for but interested to hear from people with more experience. It would also be great to be able to configure the Seagate back-up drive to copy certain files automatically from the My Passport drive but not sure this is possible.

Thanks in advance

James
vicks7
rlwainwright
1,904 posts
 
Al made a VERY good point about "cloud" backup - it is abysmally slow for large data transfers. This is not an issue if you simply need to restore a few files or a small folder. But once you start looking at multi-GB restores, cloud backups are, IMHO, just about worthless...

-RW-
rlwainwright
1,904 posts
 
Thanks for the headsup on CrashPlan, Sufentanil! This looks like a good piece of software and the fact that using it for local backups is free is very appealing.

I doubt I will take advantage of their cloud backup service because I do not wish to incur the cost and I have plenty of local storage to suit my needs.

I have just downloaded and installed it, will be testing it over the next few days to see if it's a keeper...

Best Wishes,

-RW-
zd542
5,339 posts
 
"03-09-15: Sufentanil
Zd542, I disagree with the blanket statement that WD are unreliable. They make some great drives (as does Seagate). The key understanding is that all hard drives will fail eventually."

Actually I said slow and unreliable. If I said anything else, I'd be lying. Those are the results I got. But I will say that I haven't tried all of their different models. I've used the red, blue and green ones, but not the black and purple ones. The black ones are supposed to be the best, but given my experience with all the other ones, I'm not anxious to try them. Not only that, they're a lot more expensive. Seagate, at least in my experience, last a lot longer and run at better speeds.
almarg's avatar
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almarg
9,670 posts
 
I've used the red, blue and green ones, but not the black and purple ones. The black ones are supposed to be the best, but given my experience with all the other ones, I'm not anxious to try them.
ZD, thanks for your inputs. The positive experiences I cited with WD drives, that occurred subsequent to their introduction of the "color" designations many years ago, have been with the "black" 7,200 rpm drives, and also with 10,000 rpm Raptors.

What I would suggest to the OP is that before finalizing selection of a drive that he check the user ratings and comments at Newegg.com for the particular candidate, and compare it with the ratings for competitive drives. While keeping in mind that negative experiences tend to be disproportionately represented in those ratings.

Best regards,
-- Al
vicks7 OP
182 posts
 
Thanks all - this thread has been very helpful.

My Passport drive completely failed this morning so I have removed it from the Baetis. As I am in Brazil we have much more limited choices for external drives but there are some Seagates available and I may go with one of these or maybe two - and have two separate back-ups.

I am less clear on NAS and how for example I could set one up to automatically update over the internet - I assume it would not need to be connected 24/7 to the Baeis. However my existing portable drives are not wireless so unclear how they would communicate to the NAS. Does anyone have a walk though they could send me?

The Seagate NAS STBP100 is available in Brazil - has anyone used this?

Thanks
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