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General discussion

USB HDD: Buy or Build?

May 20, 2005 4:48AM PDT

I have been meaning to get an external USB Hard Drive for backup purposes for quite some time. I was wondering if I should buy a USB HDD, or if I should get a HDD enclosure and ?roll my own?.

Thanks for any help

Discussion is locked

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I build, but it's not a backup.
May 20, 2005 4:55AM PDT

Hard disks are not a good backup medium. Only great copies.

Bob

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why not?
May 20, 2005 5:34AM PDT

Thanks for the tip, but I do not see why would a USB HDD not make a good backup device? The plan is to get a large external drive and either make disk images of my two computers every month or so, or simply copy over My Documents and /home every so often. Why would this not be a good solution?

Also, why do you build your own USB HDDs? Is there some advantage to doing so?

Thanks again.

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Here's some examples.
May 20, 2005 5:52AM PDT
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7588-0.html?forumID=70&threadID=103929&messageID=1189903
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7588-0.html?forumID=70&threadID=102577&messageID=1176443
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7588-0.html?forumID=70&threadID=103800&messageID=1188705

There are deep discussions about this, but it is not an acceptable backup for the reasons noted in the prior discussions.

I built our office units for a simple reason. There is no value added for us in the prebuilts. It's all of a philips screwdriver and some partition/format work.

Bob
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Hardware recommendations?
May 21, 2005 5:26AM PDT

I've been looking all over for information, recommendations, and guides on building a drive, and I haven't found much. Even in these forums, nobody seems to mention specifics.

I plan to build my own external hard drive to use as a file server. I need to get the files off of an old ATA/IDE internal drive on my PC. I would like to make the new drive either a USB or Firewire drive. I don't really have a preference. So, can anyone offer suggestions on:

1) what specs I should be looking for in a drive and case;
2) where I can research drives and cases that meet my needs, and get information on putting it all together;
3) what are the best places to purchase said drive and case;
4) Is the type of drive I create dependent on the actual drive or the case I get? In other words, for example, do I need to get a Firewire drive AND a firewire case, or do just need a FW case to go on my ''generic'' drive? If I go with a USB case, can I plug that into my old PC (USB 1) in order to get the data off the old drive? If the drives are all ''generic'' what type of connecters do they have?

I know I'm asking a lot of questions, but, like I said, I haven't been able to find this information anyplace.

Thanks for your help!

Gideon