External Hard Drives? (1 Viewer)

[John Watson]

External hard Drive?

As I presently have a failure in CD writing with a computer full of files, I'm wondering whether an external hard drive is a good buy to do a backup, in the event the computer screw-up can only be cured by reloading Windows.

So, I'm told the external hard drives are cinch to use. If that's true, are they ultra-reliable, compared to computers?

TIA

 

[DonRoeber]

I've got an external hard drive that I use to back some stuff up, and I also use it as a scratch disk when working with digial video. It connects to my Mac via Firewire. The external drive will only be as reliable as the hard drive inside of it, so be sure to buy a good brand.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

John, an alternative would be to use a standard hard drive in a removable bay. The bay itself fits into a normal 5.25" slot but the drive is housed in caddy which can be removed very easily. The advantage of this is that you could multiple caddies and drives and swap them around as necessary. It would probably also be cheaper than an external HD housing.

 

[John Watson]

Well, I just installed an external hard drive, and Windows offered to do a Thorough Disk Scan

I thought I should, as its new, and I would find defects on it if any.

But its at 2,000 or so clusters out of 1,800,000+, after 5 minutes.

The machine will go to sleep, or some backgound softare will kick it back to 0 on me. Am I crazy to run this check?

:frowning:

 

[DonRoeber]

No, it's a good idea to test the disk. Disable everything that may cause you to start over.

 

[John Watson]

Thanks!

I am up to 70,000 after an hour, but had not disabled anything (its an offline computer), so maybe I'll be lucky.

 

[John Watson]

Boy, this is slow!

The Scan is now at 360,000 clusters out of 1,800,000 + (ie, about 20% after 6 or so hours).

At this rate it'll be another 15 or so hours.

I have a USB connector, I suppose Firewall would be much faster, but alas, don't have it.

If this one is ok, don't think I'll want to do a Thorough Scan on a regular basis!:frowning:

 

[DonRoeber]

Yeah, firewire, or simply installing the harddrive in the computer for the formatting would be faster. You only need to do the thorough scan the first time you format the drive, unless you find that you're having read/write problems (which will probably give you blue screens on Windows).