Sorry for the bother but I could do with a quick suggestion if you have time. I've gone through some external mobile hard drive in the past which have crashed on me. Is there one you could recommend? Been thinking of getting the WD Elements 500GB or WD Passport 320GB or Seagate?????? thanks!
My answer:
Hey, I don't have a particular model in mind but I do have suggestions.
- Make sure the external hard drive is not overheating. You are
probably getting failures because of heat. So avoid the usual no-nos
like keeping the drive on the bed/blankets, leaving it in your
purse/bag while using it, leave out in the sun, etc. Try to find a
model with built in fan (most do) which will help keep it cool.
- Use RAID 1 type external hard drives. An example is this:
http://www.buy.com/prod/
The reason is that there are two hard drives inside and both will
contain the same data. The idea is that if one fails, the other will
still have good data. Then, you can replace the broken drive with a
fresh one and it will copy the data to the new one. Therefore, you
will always have at least 1 good hard drive all the time.
The con is that it is almost 2x more expensive than a comparable sized
hard drive. But you get the satisfaction of having your data protected
from random failures.
Some math from wikipedia if you don't believe me. If both hard drive
have a 5% failure rate each, then putting them in raid 1 will give you
a net failure rate of 0.25%. This means, there is only a 0.25% chance
that BOTH hard disk will fail at the same time.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
I'd buy this if you are worried about hard drive failures, ie: for
critical data that shouldn't ever disappear.
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