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External Drive Help

Hi All,

I had a surprise yesterday when my external drive - a Western Digital 1TB My Passport suddenly refused to recognise certain of my music folders (high-res and DSD downloads). I also received an error message - cyclic redundance check. Fortunately after running tools and check disk, the drive started working again and I re-imported the missing music files in JRiver.

This external drive is connected to my Baetis Server and plays music (mainly CDs ripped to FLAC using DB Poweramp) through the JRiver software. However, I am also starting to download more music over the web and this issue got me thinking as to how I might improve my back up system as these downloads have no physical media back up like a CD.

Currently as per Baetis` recommendations, I rip music to a separate external drive on my laptop using DB Poweramp or I download directly from websites like HD Tracks - in each case this music is transferred to My Passport External Drive. In addition, every time I download new music I manually copy across these files to a Seagate 4TB back-up hard drive.

Do you think I could be doing anything better in terms of handling files? I suspect it becomes a matter of how much redundancy I am prepared to pay for but interested to hear from people with more experience. It would also be great to be able to configure the Seagate back-up drive to copy certain files automatically from the My Passport drive but not sure this is possible.

Thanks in advance

James
vicks7

Showing 3 responses by almarg

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almarg
8,673 posts
 
I've used the red, blue and green ones, but not the black and purple ones. The black ones are supposed to be the best, but given my experience with all the other ones, I'm not anxious to try them.
ZD, thanks for your inputs. The positive experiences I cited with WD drives, that occurred subsequent to their introduction of the "color" designations many years ago, have been with the "black" 7,200 rpm drives, and also with 10,000 rpm Raptors.

What I would suggest to the OP is that before finalizing selection of a drive that he check the user ratings and comments at Newegg.com for the particular candidate, and compare it with the ratings for competitive drives. While keeping in mind that negative experiences tend to be disproportionately represented in those ratings.

Best regards,
-- Al
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almarg
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I agree with Michael's comments re Western Digital, and about the inevitability of drive failure. I would put it that backup strategies should be based on the assumption that any drive can fail at any time.

Regarding online backups, though, a point to keep in mind is that if and when it ever becomes necessary to download all of the online data, the time required may be very unreasonable. For example, downloading 2 terabytes of data on a 100 mbps internet connection, and assuming that the server at the other end can supply data at that rate (a big "if"), and assuming that the internet and ISP servers in between also do not limit that rate (another big "if"), would require around 56 hours of non-stop downloading. A 15 mbps connection would increase that to around 373 hours!

Regards,
-- Al
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almarg
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P.S. to my previous post: To be sure it's clear, when I said that "I agree with Michael's comments re Western Digital," I was agreeing with Michael/Sufentanil's statement that he "disagrees with the blanket statement that WD are unreliable."

I've used many WD drives over the years, with no failures at all in the last dozen or so years. Some of those drives have close to 60,000 hours on them.

Also, re the comment about speed, based on measurements I've performed on the WD drives I've purchased, all of which are either 7,200 or 10,000 rpm, those drives (at least) are certainly not slouches!

Regards,
-- Al
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