* * * UPDATE * * *
I have taken Elliot’s advice on this one and bought the following:
1.5TB (1500GB) OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro High Performance 7200RPM FireWire 400+USB2 Solution with 32MB Data Buffer and featuring the Oxford 934 Chipset. FW400 & USB2 Cables, Prosoft Data Backup, Intech HD SpeedTools, and 3 Year OWC Solution Warranty.
If all goes well, I will pick up one more in a few months, and hopefully that will keep me for a few years. I’m also curious about the backup software they include because I’ve never thought much of EMC retrospect. I can go into the various things I don’t like about it, but there’s been enough complaining in this post to last for a while. I can only say that at least on paper (screen) these look like good products. If it blows up then maybe there are ghosts in the house.
There were just too many conflicting reports on Seagate drives.
Whoever said that delayed write was drive specific – was right. Drives have been copying from one WD drive to the other for two days and nights without any issues. (Still going… but this should be done in a few hours and then all files are backed up. Will be doing reorganization once the new drive arrives. My own conclusion about the external drives (not the ones in good enclosures) is that they simply aren’t cooled properly compared to the drives in the machines.
* * * END OF UPDATE * * *
My LaCie 1TB drive just blinks now. After a day of trying to format / partition etc. and changing cables and getting tons of Delayed Write Errors, it went to the dark side. I read a bunch of stuff saying that it may only be the power supply which has been known to fail.
I was using it as my online backup drive, so now I’m in the process of recreating backups of all my files, i.e. copying the live stuff to another external drive.
Over the last few years, I’ve used LaCie (dead), Maxtor Externals, and Western Digital MyBooks. All have failed at one point or another, usually around the one year point. I’d say that the WD drives have held up the best (knock wood), but not by much. It’s just that the ones that haven’t failed have kept going the longest
Ah the beauty of technology. I suppose I’ll try and get a new power supply and see if that makes the difference, but if it isn’t that — I’m out some dough. It seems that they like to check out just as the warranty period is over.
I’ve never really had the extra cash to buy a proper solution. Don’t really care if they are hot swappable; but it would be great if they’d last more than a year. I’ve read tons of people with external drives that have lived for many years without a hitch, but I don’t seem to be lucky in that department. I’ve got about 50,000 files being copied as we talk. I also have the stuff on DVDs, but what a pain that would be if I had to go to them to do a drastic restore.
Maybe I should look at that other solution that’s been out there for a while — I forget the name — dumbro or something like that. But I suppose what I’d like the best would be an array of raid drives in a unit with a super big fan. This is one area where I really am not an expert and have been getting by by the skin of my teeth.
One thing I am going to do for sure – is do a lightroom catalog of all my sellable prints (gathered from many LR catalogs) and make sure that is properly backed up. That should be easy enough since let’s face it, I only have about 275 prints – total – that are in the store, and I don’t keep them at various sizes anymore. Just the original with it’s LR manipulations; and some super big ones that I used ProZoom to create (uhm extrapolate). It was a wasted day though — what with trying to figure out whether it was the drive, the cable, some sort of BIOS thing; etc. The last thing I did, while it was still visible was to partition the 1TB drive into three volumes, since I read somewhere that really large files could cause paging problems.
Yes, I played around with just about everything that could be effecting it (re-installing stuff; uninstalling stuff;) you know the drill, until I came across the forum where a bunch of people all talked about the blinking light and how they were saved by using a new power supply.
Well, in the meantime – I sent emails to my dad and his girlfriend to see if they’d buy some stuff from the Zazzle store. I don’t think my father has ever bought a product or print from me – he expect them for free. Which is fair since when I’ve run into financial crunches, he’s helped me out. But I love the idea of having him sip his tea from one of my cups. I am really curious to see if he can figure out how to do the order on Zazzle (along with his wife). They said they were going to give them as gifts – and so the word spreads.
Busy times. Orders came back when the mats were put back in the dropdown box; and I’ve been selling at least one item a day through Zazzle, as well as picking up a fair amount of pocket change with their referrals; i.e. someone goes in from my site, and goes somewhere else and buys something and I get 15% of the sale. A very good incentive for me to keep working.
The mugs have all turned out well. But my sister ordered a shirt for her daughter – dark material – and it seems to have melted in the dryer. She was just going to ignore it, but I talked her into writing back to Zazzle to complain about the melted shirt and they are going to send a replacement. The real question is how this stuff holds up in the heat of the dryer.
It’s not an issue with light fabric. But the technology that Zazzle uses for dark fabrics is completely different. You know what, I’ll do my own tests (force me to do my laundry) and if this does turn out to be a problem, I’ll be stuck with either printing on light fabric (no ink is put down where the image is white) or doing the dark fabric but with a warning not to stick it in the dryer; or – just remove the shirts altogether. Other than the ones I’ve bought for testing, I don’t believe I’ve sold any shirts yet.
Oh -just to keep me on my toes – the photo lessons continue. I have another two lined up. So my idea (figured out last year) of trying to have three separate streams of income – well – hard to believe but it’s working. And wonder of wonder – the FEDEX TUBES (triangles really) are excellent for large prints (and they’re free) and so I don’t need to clutter the house with the big Kraft tubes I had been buying from uLine. Since the tubes come flat, I can slice them in half and have a sort of telescopic triangle tube for the smaller unmatted prints, which actually works well since it doubles the layer of FEDEX cardboard (which is the strongest cardboard I’ve ever run across)…. so the story continues…
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the delayed write errors are not a system wide thing – but were just related to that one freakin’ LaCie drive. So far, that seems to be the case.
(Now – how’s that for an all over the place post. I think that’s what my writing trademark: start with one subject and take a grand tour of everything that’s on my mind. In the best posts, they come back to the topic sentence. But not here.)
Happy end of first day of the new year.
Seagate externals with 5 year warranties. They cost very little more, sometimes no more, you register them online, and when they break, you get a new one. More importantly, they do not seem to break. I have a couple I have been running for 2 years. Then invest $60 a year in mozy.com, which backs up everything, no limits but your patience, to the cloud. If your apartment is ransacked by national security and all your computers disappear – I mean, a guy taking pictures of NY infrastructure, I am surprised they have not visited already:-) – you just log into Mozy and download your stuff or ask them to send you DVDs if you have a lot and are in a hurry.
Ed Richards
1 Jan 10 at 10:14 pm
Thanks for the Seagate tip. Sounds perfect. I have an account with the Amazon cloud (AWS), but until FIOS reaches my area, it is just too slow for me to upload files. Time/Warner cable has a superboost thing which I pay for for downloading stuff, but nowhere near the upload speeds of FIOS. I don’t know if there’s a difference between Mosy and the Amazon Cloud. BTW, downloading from the Amazon cloud is super fast. But as I say – uploading… I would need to have it running in the background for a month or two.
I had an offer from a friend to take my external drives over to his place where he’s got a superfast connection, but never did take him up on the offer. Every few weeks I check to see if FIOS has reached my neighborhood yet – but so far – no. Once I can get that my upload speed will be tens times what I get now and it will be practical to use AWS (Amazons cloud).
I suppose I’m on some list somewhere but fortunately, as you can see from recent news, no one ever does check those lists. I usually end up just giving my business cards out to cops when they stop me. Hmmm, maybe one of them will buy a print someday.
Can you tell me more about the Seagate externals — which drives exactly — are they in enclosures, or do they come already enclosed. Do you / they use firewire or USB… I could look it up, but I just want to make sure I go for similar models that you have been using.
Thanks — Dave
dave
1 Jan 10 at 10:27 pm
Last time you were looking for an external drive I recommended OWC (macsales.com) for both high quality and low prices. Then I think you went to Best Buy and bought something shiny.
Shouting into the void again, I’ll repeat my recommendation. OWC sells an external quad-interface (Firewire 800/400, USB2, eSATA) drive (Hitaci DeskStar w/ 32Mb cache) with 3-year warranty (4 years if you pay with an Amex card). 1Tb = $180, or get it with just USB2/Firewire400 for $150. Works on Macs and PCs, comes free with NovaStor NovaBACKUP for Windows.
I’ve bought nearly a dozen drives from OWC in the last eight years, my two best friends bought backup drives from them on my recommendation, and my mom uses one of my hand-me-down drives to back up her PC. No problems.
http://tinyurl.com/3dzhmt
Elliot
2 Jan 10 at 1:13 am
Don’t some of these cloud backup services have an option where you can send them USB sticks (or DVDs, or whatever) with your files on them (thus saving you the pain of uploading)? After that, you can just do incremental backups.
Andreas
2 Jan 10 at 4:09 am
Not into the void this time
Thanks! DB
dave
2 Jan 10 at 4:12 am
Avoid Seagate like the plague, they’re the most failure-prone drives out there. I’ve owned about 30 drives from various manufacturers since 1996, every single Seagate I’ve acquired has failed, but I’ve only had one non-Seagate failure. That includes two LaCie Porsche externals. I don’t buy Seagates, but they do crop up in systems or external drives that I’ve purchased. A good warranty is no solution to failure-prone junk.
My suggestion is to buy a good HDD enclosure with a fan for proper cooling and install a good quality drive (preferably a WD or Maxtor). Assembly skills required are Ikea-level, if you can use a Phillips screwdriver, you can install the drive in the enclosure. The OWC stuff is very good as well.
Adam Maas
2 Jan 10 at 8:31 am
Just an FYI. The delayed write error are only specific to the hardware (your dying drive). It’s not (can’t be) a system wide thing.
The Drobo seems popular with photographers but is a little expensive. But hey what’s your data worth?? I set up a Raid 5 array (I work in IT) for my data with an additional external hard drive for more backup.
I’d suggest web backup for your best sellers. Mozy would work well. Unless you’re on dialup, speed won’t be an issue. It might take a few days but it will eventually complete. I backed up about 4GB of data on my parents’ computers over the holidays to Mozy and it works great. Took about 1-2 days but after the initial backup of everything, subsequent backups take seconds.
Trevor
2 Jan 10 at 9:48 am
That’s “Drobo”–http://www.drobo.com/ Storage overkill?
Reading the comments re: Seagate reminds me of reading Amazon product reviews, with someone giving something five stars, saying it’s the best thing ever, next to someone giving it one star, saying it’s a piece of junk.
Mike Mundy
2 Jan 10 at 10:05 am
Dave… I use a lot of externals and yes sometimes they do fail but “rarely” at one year. I wonder if your problem is power related as in spikes, brownouts, bad wiring in the building. The modern hard drive hates bad power.
Charles Earl
2 Jan 10 at 10:21 am
1. yes, delayed write was drive specific. I’ve been copying files from one drive to another all day and night without a problem.
2. Have looked at drobo many times; too expensive and I don’t need all the capabilities
3. Will look at muzy for my production files (about 275)
4. Am leaning towards taking Elliot’s advice this time – the OWC drives.
5. Still have a full day of copying files left.
Thanks everyone for all the info. Yes, it is funny when you see one guy say so-and-so is the greatest, never had a problem; next guy hates the stuff.
6. I suppose it’s possible there have been brownouts or surges -(drives are all in surge protectors) but that wouldn’t effect a brownout. It’s just that I don’t have anyway of knowing if I have brownouts without getting some instrument to measure the current over time. It’s not anything that I’ve ever noticed.
dave
2 Jan 10 at 11:41 am
Dave,
I think that Mozy is using AWS behind the scenes – they just provide the backup client.
I’ve got Sans Digital dual-drive enclosure from OWC – you can set it to mirror (RAID-0) or JBOD mode, although I’m not sure how good is their controller. Have been working fine for over a year.
Eugene Z
2 Jan 10 at 12:36 pm
Dave, I have build my own RAID-5 backup server with RAID-5 hw controller for 16 SATA disks, placed it into Pentium III big tower bought 5 WD green disks for start. Used FreeNAS soft for it. Works fine no for over two years. Nicely expandable, but not portable. All this costs 100$ for controller from eBay, and price of disks. Case and all PIII I had. I use it as permanent backup
richo
2 Jan 10 at 7:19 pm
Richo, can you stop by my house when you have a chance and build one for me. I’ll treat you to lunch. (To put it another way, that’s one of the few things technically that I just don’t want to do. I’ve been willing to take printers apart to clean them and figure out what’s wrong; but I’m not able / willing to spend the time to do that. Seriously though, Another thing that I haven’t done, when a lot of my programmer type friends were doing it – was build my own box. In short – I’ll be getting the OWC’s that are already put together and hopefully that piece of backup software is better than retrospect which I really don’t care for.
At this point I’m back in business again, i.e. have copied all images to another drive WD MyBook (which I bought a year ago and which I knew I would need one day).
dave
2 Jan 10 at 7:27 pm
I would love to drop by, just the distance is stopping me from doing that
I understand your point. I went this way as I had no money to buy similar capacity and performance device.
-r-
richo
3 Jan 10 at 6:01 am
Good luck with your drive, Dave. OWC is a cool company.
While the 1Tb drives I recommended are Hitachi I think that the 1.5Tb drives use a Seagate mechanism. You might want to check. Personally I don’t have a problem with either brand for my drives….
Do you have a backup drive waiting for it? When I had to move move my photos off my internal 750Gb drive, I ended up buying two 1Tb externals from OWC (which matched the 1Tb I already used as backup, and the two 500Gb drives I use for my work files + backup).
As far as the backup software goes, I know nothing about what comes with the OWC drives. I never tried using the free Mac backup software they provded because I happily use a different 3rd-party backup program for my Mac which also backs up my Windows partition and files. But NovaBACKUP did get a good review at Softpedia:
http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/NovaBACKUP-Professional-Edition-Review-35537.shtml
Elliot
3 Jan 10 at 8:52 pm
Elliot – yes, the 1.5TB uses Seagate Baracuda… some drives use Hitachi, and 500MB drives are WD. Whatever. I’m going to take a look at the NovaBACKUP software now. Retrospect doesn’t allow you to create individual jobs, i.e. if I want to backup one set of files to one drive, and another set of files to another drive, I can’t do it with the OEM version of Retrospect.
And when things go wrong – as they did in this case with the LaCie drive – the Retrospect backups were corrupted and couldn’t be read by Retrospect.
dave
4 Jan 10 at 3:19 pm
That Seagate drive should be fine.
The manager of the mainfame dept. at a company I once worked at told me that it wasn’t as important you were backing up than you were successfully restoring. (That company contracted out its backups to an IBM subsidiary that controlled a vault buried in a mountain in Pennsylvania that kept clients’ file sets.)
I kept that dictum to heart. The backup software I use for my Mac does drive cloning (and incremental backups), and it’s super easy to simply restart the Mac from the external clone to make sure everything’s running. Likewise, from time to time I’ll turn off my data drives, turn on the clones and test everything out.
I don’t know how easy or difficult it is to do that on PCs, but I find it to be safe and effective.
I’m considering a secondary backup for essential files using the online service crashplan.com which provides unlimited offline backups for $54/year — but expect to spend days if not weeks backing up hundreds of megs of files, as upstream net bandwidth is fairly obnoxious in the USA. The service lets you back up by drive, folder and/or file, and lets you perform file exclusion by name or expressions-pattern. In emergencies, they’ll even send you a filled hard drive with your files for $100 (and you have to mail back the drive afterwards).
Elliot
4 Jan 10 at 7:03 pm