An external drive, such as the Maxtor OneTouch III 500GB External Hard Drive, lets you back up your important data. Its 500GB of space will give you ample room to back up your entire system or just the pictures of your kids, financial data, and maybe even emails from friends that you’d hate to lose if your hard drive fails. You might consider getting an external DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, such as the Samsung SE-W184M, so you can back up your data to DVD and store the discs somewhere outside your home.
Whether you have private personal information or business documents that you want to keep from prying eyes, the LaCie SAFE Hard Drive is a good choice. It can ably serve as a personal lockbox for your sensitive files or as a way to grant selected access to data on a shared computer. It can protect a lot of secrets with its 500GB capacity, though data transfer is limited to USB 1.1 and 2.0.
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The SAFE provides biometric security by means of a fi ngerprint reader. It can store fi ngerprints for up to fi ve users, for whom you can grant either readwrite or read-only access. The fingerprint reader was finicky, and sometimes it would take several scans of a fi nger to gain access. For physical security, the safe provides a cable-lock port, plus an internal drive lock, which prevents a thief from cracking the case, removing the drive and putting it into another case.
Designwise, the SAFE is uninspired a blocky metal slab with rounded corners and an indentation with the fi ngerprint reader on top. Maybe, though, that’s a fitting design for a vault that can safeguard half a terabyte of your precious data.
Storage capacity, versatility and style define this spacious external hard drive. Its half-terabyte (500GB) capacity should allow more than enough room for most multimedia collections. Though it’s not the largest drive out there, the My Book’s combination of storage space, performance, connection methods, backup software, and sleek look.
The My Book Pro’s metallic case is a good match for the MacBook Pro or the PowerBook G4, as well as aluminum cases on high-end Windows PC towers. A capacity gauge with a circular LED on the front panel lets you know how much space you have left in the drive without your having to right-click on your hard drive icon. The My Book Pro runs a solid backup software program (Dantz Retrospect Express). The drive is compatible with three of the most common connection interfaces, USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and includes cables for all three. FireWire 800 tested the fastest, taking only about two-thirds as long to download a 1.2GB test file as either of the other methods.
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If you have music, photos, or video to store, the My Book Pro is a sleek and spacious choice that works with several interfaces, including the scorching FireWire 800. It’s one “book” that can be judged by its cover, with its performance every bit as good as its looks.
If you’re out of space on your system, it’s time to add a new hard drive to your PC or just reconfigure an old one. There’s no real need to set up even the largest drives into multiple partitions anymore, as the system BIOS can address all the storage in one partition. However, partitions can still make for good housekeeping, and you might consider creating a separate partition for any network shares you’d like to make, for storing drivers and software installation files that you plan to reuse and want easy access to.
Or you may wish to use one partition to install the operating system and critical apps and another for your data files, which will simplify backup tasks. Here’s how to go about it.
Partitioning as you install Windows
Use Windows Setup’s partitioning system to set partitions appropriately as you go through the process. Format the partition(s) with NTFS. After you have installed Windows, copy any data you need from the original drive to the new one. You can then retire the old drive or clean it off for use as additional storage.
Partitioning under Windows
To set up a new or existing drive in Windows, go to Start > Settings > Control Panel, and click Administrative Tools >Computer Management >Storage > Disk Management. Your drive should appear; new drives will show as unformatted space. Partition the space by right-clicking in the unformatted area and selecting New Partition; then, to format each partition, right-click in the partition and choose New Logical Drive.
Copious third-party tools offer options to ease partition management and disk maintenance. Norton PartitionMagic and Diskeeper 2007 Home can streamline the operations if you’re uncomfortable working with Windows’ tools. Users with lots of PC upgrade experience can save some dough when they add a new drive by buying it bare. Such a drive works well if you’re not planning to use it as a boot disk or if you intend to install Windows fresh.
With so many users backing up to hard drives, it’s a wonder EMC didn’t start selling its supereasy-to-use EMC Retrospect Express HD 2.0 backup program sooner. Previously available only when bundled with Maxtor’s OneTouch hard drives, Retrospect Express HD has been redesigned and released on its own.
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The shipping version of the $50 application and found it as simple and intuitive to use as its full-blown Retrospect Professional cousin is complex. Unlike the Professional version, Express HD is single-job software: It does one full backup, and then provides incremental backups of a single data set.
Express HD makes getting into a backup routine a quick process. You configure your backups via an attractive step by step wizard and manage them through a system tray menu. I found that the lack of a traditional, option filled configuration dialog box took a bit of getting used to; but in the end, Retrospect Express HD’s keep-it-simple, set it and forget it philosophy rapidly won me over.
The program allows you to schedule backups up to once a day a sufficient frequency for most users as well as to manage backups in a timeline as restore points. The version I tested reliably handled the backup chores I threw at it.
The biggest problem I had with Retrospect Express HD is its price: $50 is awfully steep for a program without disaster recovery. But cost aside, I have no qualms about recommending Retrospect Express HD to all who want to back up their systems with a minimum amount of fuss.
Many of you are thinking about buying an external hard drive for backups. The most common type on the store shelves uses USB 2.0 to connect to your computer. You can buy one of these, connect it to nearly any computer, and get so-so speeds. A FireWire drive will give you roughly similar performance, but at a higher price and less compatibility.
On the other hand, if your computer supports eSATA (external Serial Advanced Technology Attachment), you can make your backups go a lot faster with a compatible external hard drive. eSATA basically extends your computer’s internal SATA ports outside your computer. It uses a stronger type of data cable connector, however, so an eSATA plug is shaped differently than a SATA plug.
From personal experience that eSATA is fast, but I’d never pinned down exactly how fast it was in comparison to internal, USB, and FireWire drives. I set out to test a drive using each of these interfaces and benchmarking software to prove which one is the victor.
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Vantec graciously loaned me a couple of excellent external hard drive enclosure kits. Add your own 3.5-inch hard drive to one of these enclosures, and you’ll have an external drive ready for backups or extra storage space. One kit, the NexStar 3 NST-360SU, turns a SATA drive into an eSATA and USB 2.0 unit. The NexStar 3 NST-360UF accepts a common IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) hard drive and supports USB 2.0 and FireWire.
And there was the rub. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use the same drive for all my tests because the eSATA enclosure required a SATA drive and the FireWire kit needed an IDE drive. To get around this, I located two 80GB Maxtor hard drives that were identical except for their interfaces, SATA and IDE (the 6Y080M0 and 6Y080P0).
As you can see from my test results in the chart, eSATA is undeniably the fastest external option. With a substantial performance lead over USB or FireWire, eSATA can significantly speed up your backups. In fact, eSATA is so fast that you won’t be able to tell whether you’re accessing an internal or external drive.
There’s more good news: Even if your computer doesn’t have an eSATA port, you may not need to buy a $25 adapter card to add one. The Vantec NST-360SU comes with a simple bracket that installs in an empty expansion card slot and connects to one of your motherboard’s SATA plugs. I found similar brackets from here, here, and others online for few dollars only.
USB will be with us for a long, long time. As a hard drive connection, though, its days are numbered.
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Since Seagate began shipping 750GB hard drives in April 2006, no manufacturer has released a drive that has hit the hallowed 1TB mark. However, Seagate has announced that it will begin shipping 1TB drives in the first half of this year, and the drives will use perpendicular technology, which is increasingly allowing hard drives to shatter previous capacity records.
The company’s current 750GB drives also use perpendicular recording, which allows more data to be stored on disks than traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate claims that its 1TB drives will also use fewer heads and disks than drives of similar capacity that are expected to be released, which will help to increase drive reliability and reduce operating temperatures, power consumption, noise, and weight.
Seagate is also making moves on the speed front, announcing a new 2.5-inch, 15,000rpm drive that the company claims is “the world’s fastest hard drive.” The Savvio 15K drive features a seek time of just 2.9ms (milliseconds), or far less than the roughly 8.5ms seek
times found in 7,200rpm drives.
On the downside for consumers, the new drive uses an SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface and is initially aimed at data center customers.
View Seagate 750GB Internal Ultra SATA-16MB now.
Tape has been giving way to the external hard drive as the preferred backup medium in small businesses. But if you need off-site copies of your data, hauling home a heavy, fragile hard drive seems less than ideal. Instead, to complement your external hard drives, consider the Iomega Rev Loader 560GB, a device that holds up to eight removable 70GB disks, each housed in a shock-resistant plastic case about the size of a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
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The REV 560 does cost far more than an external hard drive, but when you need more capacity, you don’t have to purchase and install an entire hard drive, you just buy more disks. A four-pack gives you 280GB for $210, so incremental costs don’t hit you too hard.
The included software will span media for backups requiring more than 70GB. If you just want to copy files to and from a REV disk, you can use normal drag-and-drop. The device’s currently active disk shows up as a drive under My Computer in Microsoft Windows. When it comes to keeping a lot of data off-site, the Iomega REV Loader 560 makes the process almost painless.
Backing up assorted collections of music, videos, photos, and documents can turn into a time-consuming project. Besides the effort you expend locating the files, extensive multimedia
libraries require an external hard drive with a sizeable storage capacity. Designed for ease-of-use and available in 60GB or 100GB, CMS Products’ copy2go external drive features a built-in search and copy software that lets you manage all your multimedia files in one application.
Once connected, the copy2go software searches any connected hard drive, flash drive, CD/DVD, digital camera, and MP3 player for multimedia files and arranges them in a convenient folder structure. A “Sticky Selection” feature allows you to choose files across multiple folders without losing your previous selections, and a keyword search tool can help you locate specific files. For greater convenience, you can also group related collections or favorite files into separate databases.
With a weight of 7 ounces and dimensions hardly larger than a smartphone, copy2go is portable enough to carry in your coat pocket or laptop bag.
The copy2go External Drive Specs & Features:
Swiftly transfers data at 480Mbps through its USB 2.0 interface Searches for image formats JPEG, GIF, TIF, CRW, and DNG Searches for music formats MP3, WMA, M4A, M4P, ATRAC, RA, RAM, and SNG Searches for video formats AVI, MMV, MPG, QuickTime, MP4, and WMV Searches for document formats XLS, PPT, TXT, WDB, VSD, DXF, MDE, DOC, PDF, SWF, GRF, AI, PST, WPS, ZIP, MPP, and PUB
Click here to view CMS Products 100GB Copy2go Multi-Media c2g-100.
Some people burn out hard drives faster than they run through shampoo. Video-editing pros (and buffs), heavy file downloaders, and people who build their own servers are especially vulnerable. The same users require blazing data-transfer speed. It’s crucial for them to have a fast, highcapacity, and fail-safe data backup system such as the CMS Velocity2 RAID Backup System.
The Velocity2’s twin 500GB Western Digital 7,200-rpm SATA hard drives are user-replaceable with just a snap. The system holds a terabyte of data when configured for speed in RAID 0. Most users, though, will want to mirror the drives in RAID 1 for redundant backup of up to 500GB of data.
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The Velocity2 is the fastest external drive I’ve tested (when using the eSATA card and interface). Now, eSATA can theoretically transfer up to 3 Gbps, compared with a 480 Mbps max for USB 2.0. Using eSATA, the drive transferred our 1.2GB test file in 28 seconds, just under half the time it took with USB 2.0 (58 to 60 seconds).
The Velocity2 includes CMS’s BounceBack Professional software, which is both feature-rich and easy to use. It can handle a range of tasks, from document file versioning all the way to complete disaster recovery. Between its software and backup redundancy, the Velocity2 is sure to keep your mission-critical data safe and sound.