Good backup hardware

[bowmah]

I am thinking about purchasing a USB2.0 external hard drive to back up all my media. Anyone have any tips and/o product suggestions? My machine is a laptop with USB2.0, Firewire and RJ45 connections.

[redwudz]

If you have Firewire I/O on your laptop, I would definitely suggest a external Firewire drive. It just has less problems with data transfers, especially large video files than does USB. A good compromise that I use is a external drive with both Firewire and USB 2.0. That gives you more options for just a small increase in price.

[brightlight]

I recently bought a very high quality Apricorn EZ-BUS-DTC-KIT Combo USB/Firewire Backup & External Storage Enclosure that included some nice backup software (e.g. can back up entire drives and create boot disks) . I then simply dropped in a 200GB Maxtor that I had bought for $30 AR on black friday and it works great.

If you prefer, you can simply use it as an external drive (e.g. it just maps as a new drive on your system when you power it on).

Firewire is faster than USB2.0 if you have it, but USB (along with downward 1.1 compatibility) gives more flexibility.

Edit:

There is an excellent external enclosure discussion here:
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/28/496281

-BL

[bowmah]

Hey thanks for the replies and the link. After checking out some of the prices for an external USB/firewire drive. I am VERy tempted to purchase a new PC now You guys are killing me! I can be strong, I can be strong.

[redwudz]

Ahh, my chance to really ruin someones day............

The hot setup that I have been playing with is external SATA boxes. What's not to like? Full SATA speed 150MB/S transfers. (On paper, at least) External power, so no drag on the system. Hot swappable. SATA drives are inexpensive now and the boxes are out there. You just need a PCI SATA card with a external connector or there's adapters for a PCI slot pass through connector for a regular internal card.

Just one example:

http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/sata-drive-enclosures.htm

Compared to USB 2.0 or Firewire, this is a nice alternative.

[waheed]

You sure cant beat SATA. I already own a SATA drive (200GB) inside an Enclosure which is both USB 2.0 and SATA. My MB came with a SATA bracket for connecting SATA externally. The speed is amazing and fast as my internal SATA drives.

In all of my tests, SATA was 3-4 times faster than USB 2.0