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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
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
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,456 posts
 
I have been running reliably with Seagate external USB drives for a few years now and can easily recommend those. Mine came with decent backup software pre-installed which is a nice bonus.
yioryos's avatar
yioryos
723 posts
 
So I bought a second WD Red 4TB. Now I am ready to set up my Assustor 2 bay NAS in Raid 1.
Strangely enough the second WD drive cost me 20 mote than first one,5 months ago.
I expected them to lower in price BUT the opposite happens,the prices keep going up it seems.
George
yioryos's avatar
yioryos
723 posts
 
I meant to say 20 dollars more in cost.
Damn auto spell check.
George
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