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[zevele10]

If i buy  Western Digital 250 giga drive.
And use it as a back up.
What i mean is this: from other drives  i copy some songs to the 250.
And i never use the drive to play music  or tag ect.
Can i expect the drive to last a very long time?
Or just possible that ,like drives you use ,it can blow up?

[Sadashiv1]

Best place to get answer is the drive manufacturer.

[Harry_The_Hipster]

Just received the Maxtor 5000xt - 250G external that I'm going to use purely for back-up. Once that's done, I'll transcode all of my APEs on the source drives to VBR to free up additional space.

Assume that sporadic use, combined with lower speed (5400) will reduce wear and tear on the drive.

HTH

[zevele10]

Assume that sporadic use, combined with lower speed (5400) will reduce wear and tear on the drive.


it is what i hope also......

who knows ,we may be right.....

[Glen]

If you leave the drive in the system and powered up but not used on a daily basis it might last a little longer but it is still going to die eventually (power glitch, thermal, etc.).
But what if you take and put it into a removable drive tray. Transfer your files to the new drive and then pull it and store it somewhere safe. You just have to pop it back into the system for updates but your lifetime will be much much longer. I am doing the same with my system backups and I feel much more confident about the drives reliability. (or at least as much as you can feel with electronics)
Glen.

[xen-uno]

Z....

The non-Server version of NT/W2k/XP do not support software RAID. So for my (2) new 60GB drives, I am writing a backup batch file. It will look at selected directories and files contained within and see whether the Archive bit has been set or not. If it has been then it will assume the file is new or modified since last "backup". It will then copy those files from the first drive to the 2nd drive, then clear the Archive bit. The batch file can be brought up automatically (and interactively) using the Scheduler service (aka the AT command under the CMD window). Nice thing about this is that it doesn't require the drives to be same brand & model (RAID works best if they are). It should be fast after it is run the first time. MS Backup (last I checked) puts backed up files in containers (compressed too, I imagine). No way to extract w/o running MSB.

sound interesting?

10^-27

[zevele10]

Saturday i will have 600 GB- yes six hundred-
So there is no way i can back up all
With 2 problems i lost around 250 MB of music.
Large part of it not avaible anymore- few thousands from Audiogalaxy- hours of concerts from HOB and tons from MP3.com.
Thinking about solutions for partial back up ,drive is the less expensive and the easyer way.
Regular blank cds not really smart ,need for hundreds and hundreds--DDV cd still to much expensive  and online stockage .........$8000/year for 100 GB

Today ,sure i would like vey much to have hundreds and hundreds of  cds with part of what i lost on it.
Now the cheaper - drives- just do not last long.
They may stop to built bigger and bigger and try to put out 'long life' drives....
Even removable drive tray does not give you life garantie - well let say years and years ,not life-

And i still have tapes i did 30 years ago who play fine.....

[JimH]

Zev,
Drives really don't fail that often, but they also have an ability to fail at the worst time.

In twenty-some years, I've had 3 or 4 bad moments.  Times when you want to find a wall you can beat your head against.

Sometimes there is a way back.

Once, my female-friend-now-gone-but-still-loved had a complete failure, was a disaster herself for a day or two, pulled herself together and took the drive to a local service where they said, "Uh, we have a lot of trouble with these Bigfoot drives.  We'll take a look."  No joy.  Nada y pues nada.  

She brought the drive home in tears, and laid it at my feet.  I was touched.

For two days, I tried booting her machine and getting data off it.  Sometimes nothing happened.  Sometimes a few files were visible across the network.

After this time, I thought, It works, quelque-fois, mais pas toujours, et j'ai pense, "le froid, c'est ca!".

I put the drive in the freezer for 30 minutes, put it back in the PC, and "shazam!", everything came off the drive.

I think you will appreciate that there is some luck involved.  It's what makes us alive.  What makes us hope.

[nila]

I had a hard drive crash this summer and lost a LARGE amount of work and several websites I had build.
I also lost my e-mails etc.

As a result I have now set up a mirrored raid and have my important files saved on it.

This way is pretty much safe against hard drive failures even though it's not at all safe against viruses and such like. Hard drive recovery software though should hopefully be able to safely undelete any files deleted by any virus so I'm hoping I'm now fine.