Longterm Data Storage Needed!

[jimmalenko]

I'd use a removable hard drive tray. Fits into your computer in a 5 1/4 drive slot and is generally hot-swappable.

[TyLord]

Where can you get one of these and how much do they cost? I have done a little searching and no one seems to have any actual information regarding them. Can you direct me to the right place? Thanks

[sacajaweeda]

We could tell you but we'd have to kill you.
You know too much already.

[TyLord]

We could tell you but we'd have to kill you.
You know too much already.

Hilarious

Nevermind jimmalenko i found some great reviews on some really nice ones. I wasn't looking for the right item.

Anyone else who's interested, Vantec makes some that get really good reviews, called EZ-Swap.

[jimmalenko]

They're about $20 AUD here:
http://www.centrecom.com.au/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=93_57&products_id=3899&ccsi...6162abc7d3579b

[wayl0n]

Also does the brand of hard drive matter much?

Any component in your computer matters on the brand. Cheapo brand-X parts may be half the price and may work fine for a while, but I've been screwed sooooo many times on them because either the company ends up going out of business, or they have no software team can can't fix bugs or develop drivers, or their tech support team cant speak english enough to tell you what the heck is wrong with the thing, its worth it to pay the few extra dollars and have the peace of mind. One thing I ALWAYS do now when buying a part, is go to a retailer site such as Newegg, or Amazon and read the actual customer reviews from people who have bought that exact product, I've never regretted a purchase when doing this.

I bought a Western Digital Caviar 250GB as a secondary drive less than a year ago, not giving it a second thought since it was a name brand, and it ran great for a month, then all of a sudden, I would try to access it and all the data was gone and Windows wanted to format it. After several, several four lettered words, I formatted, and the drive began working again. One week later, same problem. I formatted again and the next day, the same thing. I took the drive back to the store, and got another to replace it. This one died in less than one day! At that point I began researching and discovered several people had similar problems. No one manufacturer is best, all of them have their lemon models, so always reserach the exact model you are thinking of getting before plunking down the money.

[DereX888]

The "brand name" is a common misconception from the past. There are no such things anymore (well, almost). Western Digital may have designed their hdd, but it was manufactured - actually ordered for manufacturing - in some chinese factory. Seagate or Fujitsu may have designed their drives as well, but trust me - 75-90% of the parts used in their design are the same as other brand's designs, because they "order manufacturing" of their drives in the same chinese factories. Some GuangZhou Electronic Plant is in reality the real manufacturer since they make WD models today, Fujitsus next week, and maybe Seagates next month. Call it "outsourcing the plants", and sometimes I wonder do those "brands" like i.e. Fujitsu - do they still have any real factory belonging to them? I guess most of them don't, i.e. Hewlett Packard does NOT manufacture anything itself for years already. All they do is they design the devices from the off-the-shelves available parts which targeted manufacturing company is capable of using without any major production line redesign.
And thats the problem with most of the brands manufacturing their stuff in China.
Because in China nothing wastes there. Rejected batches or series of products (those below specs or even straight defective), that used to be destroyed by manufacturers (i.e. IBM used to that when they were still in computer business ) nowaydays are still being sold to those who are interested in them at the cost, and in the end those unreliable retail suppliers sell that crap to us as a full-value products, often still under same brand & model (before they used to at least rebadge them).
How can you tell your WD Caviar is really from the series manufactured under the WD's order? Even WD can't tell that. The 'serial numbers' are a joke, if anything would indicate it - it would have to be manufacturing plant's description (in form of plant/manufacturing date/time) as it used to be printed on every electronics, but guess what - no such luck anymore either. All you get nowadays is the month/year of manufacturing.
Only some strict on quality control companies (say Taiyo Yuden, Toshiba, Panasonic and few others) still do that, but its not reliable either - there are tons of fake TY medias, and other products. But thats the byproduct of us moving the high-tech sophisticated devices production to the third world countries, without any morals or 'good business conduct' at all. Most of americans want their shares to grow infinitly and give them at least 100% stock value growth a year, and in the same time they don't want to spend *more* on any better products, they only see "per dollar values", while quality is not important, or distant second at best - and manufacturers know it too
After all, how hard it is to put 'correct' labels on a series of rejected products? What we know as "Lenovo" brand is the chinese electronic corporation, which used to manufacture *all* the IBM's laptops. Thats why on Asian and partially european "blackmarkets" you could have buy every current IBM model (back then) for 1/3 - 1/2 of their price in US. They weren't stolen - they were simply rejected batches that were not detroyed as they supposed to. Its no wonder they 'bought' the laptops product line from IBM - after all *they* were the real manufacturers of the IBM laptops, and all they needed was the 'brand-name ownership' to become legitimate manufacturers on their own

I can't wait until Intel and AMD move their manufacturing plants to China as well...

[jh61408]

Hi, I have been reading about Hard drive Storage. I am for one doing that. I am building a 5 bay storage Tower with a Built in Port Multiplier. I will be able to take 5 drives and read them as one big drive By way of Raid. I am using 5-500 gig Seagate in the enclosure. I have a card in my pc that will allow me to add 5 of them storage towers later if needed. I then am able to use my DVR that has a built in Video player function that has all my DVD's listed with a Cover pic to make it easy to know what the DVD is. I thought about a storage unit for the DVDs but with this i can View what movie i want to view and hit play and watch the movie and if i need to make a copy all i have to do i insert a DVD-R or +. And make a copy. I will be building a second tower for Back-up of the first just in case. But i know with technology these days, I have heard that Memory Chips will be in the Multiple GIG range shortly. I guess Samsung is working on a 30 gig Chip as of right now. So it will not be long to get 1000 GIG chips, for back-up of data or Movies.