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General discussion

Do you think it still makes sense to buy a big hard drive?

Oct 9, 2014 10:29AM PDT

Discussion is locked

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I use a lot of mechancial hard drives for backups.
Oct 10, 2014 10:25AM PDT

A lot of the new hard drives use USB3 and that is pretty fast. Additionally internal drives use the newer SATA interfaces. My computer came with a 1 terabyte hard drive 4 years ago, and now have about 136 gig stored on it. Pretty decent 1 terabyte and more can frequently be purchased for near $100. That is dirt cheap compared to what they cost a few years ago. I back up to a 1.5 terabyte external drive and also do instantaneous back up with my 1 terabyte HP drive. This has a back up program that backs up every 5 minutes whenever the computer is on, so effectively I have a full back up copy of my computer that is no more than 5 minutes old. Many Many years ago, I had a hard drive go back without a back up, and it was a very painful experience. Since Flash drives are so inexpensive today, it is good to have your photos and music backed up to one of those. You can never have too many backup copies. If you ever suffered a complete loss, you would understand that. The fact that you have a large main drive is not problem since you can also get a large back up drive and if you have a USB3 drive, it s pretty quick. The reason the turn out so many computers with 1 terabyte and larger is that the cost of a hard drive that large is reasonable and people like having large drives so that they almost never run out. You can also move infrequently accessed data to an external drive to gain more room for more frequently accessed data. This is a pretty good decade for not losing computer data.

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Storage
Oct 10, 2014 10:37AM PDT

If you use a hard drive for storage, you have to realize that, at some point, it may just dies on you. Therefore, you must consider a periodic backup on a different media. Both hard drives and SSD drives last a long time. SSD technology (NAND) still has limits on the "write cycles" but you should not lose data on that; you will only drop into read-only mode.

As for storing stuff in the cloud, you need to be very wary about who the cloud provider is. Make sure you read the Terms of Service (ToS) and the Privacy Policy at a minimum to decide if your data will be safe enough. Many employees of these firms have not undergone a background check and may be overseas. Also some providers read all of your stuff (especially if the service is free) in order to direct appropriate advertising at you. Also, they are required to submit your stuff to the police or the government if requested to do so. Also, know how much they will let you store before charging you. Many providers have been hacked and information released.

Servers (including NAS storage) for storage work quite well. You may want to make sure that you are running the correct RAID level for your data and keep at least one spare drive of the correct size and type as that may not be easy to obtain many years from implementation.

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Small SSD, external drive, OneDrive
Oct 10, 2014 1:28PM PDT

To have an internal drive larger than 128gb seems to make no sense now. Not long ago I used a 340gb HDD, then I upgraded to a 250gb SSD and bought an external 1tb HDD (I also have a 1.5tb HDD for films etc, but don't use it much), then finally I recently bought a Surface Pro 3 with only 128gb SSD.

Of that 128gb SSD I have 81gb free, unused! That is because I use the OneDrive facility which now contains most of my files, and I have made most of my files 'online only'. Online only means I need to download it if I need to read the file, but that happens seldom. It also means it's immediately available to my cell phone.

However I also have most of my stuff backed up on my external HDD. Since starting using Windows 8.1 in various PCs over a year ago, the free Windows 8.1 File History system has automatically backed up everything. Consequently, although most of what I want is in 36gb of my available 50gb OneDrive cloud storage, I do also have just about all of it in the external HDD; plus a whole lot of old stuff; plus a lot of copies also... It's really difficult to control all the old stuff without spending time on it; and truthfully it doesn't really matter since memory is so cheap now.

I pay $1 per month for 50gb OneDrive storage!

I pay $12 per month for Office 365. That includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, plus something else...
1. I believe it's a great idea since all upgrades happen without you knowing or paying for them.<div>2. Its available anywhere you can log in.
3. Three of us can use the one license.
4. We EACH get 1tb of FREE online storage! (I'll never use that in this lifetime, since I'm not a corporation.)

Not a bad deal I reckon. Also, as a matter of interest, one of my Surfaces went belly up a few months ago: The interesting part was that, although it was a pain re-establishing etc, I lost absolutely nothing apart from a few items I had left on the desktop. I guess that's why I'm using less than 20gb of 'PC drive' memory, all my other stuff is elsewhere, out of the way; to be called up only on the odd occasion that I might need it; or maybe never..
</div>

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It all depends...
Oct 10, 2014 1:38PM PDT

Your own selection of answers pretty much covered what many users would want and then have to decide to go with. I can't see differing from my current setup of having a large HD and refusing to use the cloud other than small storage that are given as free. i just don't want to use the cloud for anything super data storage. At the same time, I don't need more than 2Tb right now and even that provides more than enough for a long time. I'm sure some users have globs of pix and video that suck-up storage and maybe music. Others are have super large music collections but have thier most used ones on the cloud. Overall, if you need requires some storage, it will become evident what you need or fallback on. the real question, "do you back-up" a 2Tb or 4Tb storage, maybe yet with another 2-4Tb media unit.

I use a 2Tb HD and a little cloud(2gb) that suits me fine.

tada -----Willy Happy

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Live and learn
Oct 10, 2014 8:56PM PDT

I learned a lesson about various technology devices from these happenings . . .
When my cousin visited Mexico, she had an expensive, amazing, new camera. She had a huge memory card in it for all her photos. Her travel companion had several cards with smaller memory capacities to them and changed the cards out every so often. When their cameras were stolen by one of their taxi drivers at gun point, my cousin also lost every picture she had taken so far on that trip (they were toward the end of the trip), but her friend had lost only that day's photos. The rest were back in his hotel room.
Years ago, a college room mate of mine, had saved all her band shows onto three DVDs in her office at school. The school burned down one night, and she had to try to remember - and also - had to start to devise new band show routines from scratch. After that, she kept back ups of her shows on various types of media and in various places: home, the new school, the chorus teacher's house, etc.
The hard drive on my husband's old laptop failed one day, and although our friend tried, his documents and photos could never be retrieved.
These incidents helped me with other technological things in my life. Do not keep only one or even two copies all together on one big drive or cloud or whatever it happens to be. Keep copies in various places and in various forms. If what you're saving is something you need or even something you just like, you won't regret it.
Remember the old saying: Don't put all your eggs into one basket. Good luck!

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Depends on how you define 'big hard drive'.
Oct 11, 2014 6:01AM PDT

With HDD prices often within a few dollars of each other ...why buy a 500GB, 750GB or a 1TB when the price of a 2TB HDD is within an affordable margin over the smaller HDDs ?

The extra space on larger HDDs allows me to make more image backups of my OS and APP drive and my DATA drive in the unlikely event the latest image is corrupt or perhaps infected.

VAPCMD

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True
Oct 11, 2014 8:51AM PDT

Often, though, the larger hard drives may be a bit slower. At least with "seek time". I'm not sure if this is true today though.