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General discussion

Longer lasting external drive

Sep 13, 2009 12:29AM PDT

I have a Seagate free agent external drive which I use primarily for backup and to store my pictures . I don,t use it often but I do use it on occassion. Recently I have read a lot about these drives going bad. I would hate to lose my pictures so I have unplugged the drive and just turn it on when I want to use it (which is a nuisance). What I would like opinions on is whether this is helping to prolong the life of the drive or can I keep it on all the time without noticably shortening the life of the drive.

Discussion is locked

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This one is easy. Ask the big question.
Sep 13, 2009 2:26AM PDT

Where is the backup?

Many call these externals backup but let's say it fails. Do you lose anything? If so, that's no backup. For us to have backups that means more than 1 and if we want to keep in a state of backup when something fails we must have 3 copies on 3 devices. That way when one fails we continue to be in a state of backup even when an unit has expired.

As to longer lasting. These are 5 year designs. This is another reason to ponder what is backup.
Bob

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Expect those ext. HDs...
Sep 13, 2009 5:53AM PDT

Many of these ext. HDs weren't meant as a permanent storage but rather "working storage" as a place to place data and then move to storage like CD/DVD, etc. and as well some form of mobile storage. The idea behind mobile is that no other media will handle the large amounts of data and unplug and plug elsewhere. As pointed out by Robert, these shouldn't be considered as a back-up media and more to the point a temporary one until a more permanent method is found.

tada -----Willy Happy