What is the better kind of HDD to store content?
Hi guys. It may be a newbie question, so be it.
After losing a lot of my Poser content because of a defective external HDD (which prompted me to embrace DAZ about 1y ago), I'm curious on how you guys manage your content libraries.
I've recently bought a new rig with a 500gb SSD drive for Windows, and I'm storing my personal content library on a portable 2TB Western Digital disk so that I can use it also on my laptop. However, it looks fragile, and I'm afraid of losing my content again. Should I transfer all the content to an external (tabletop eSATA) HDD? Or should I buy a newer, bigger, internal one?
Which kind of HDD is best for storing libraries? Do you save it on an external HDD? A portable one? An SSD (which may be expensive, as DAZ3D libraries tend to be bigger than Poser ones)? Or just a good old internal drive? What are the pros and cons of each option?
Thank you for your replies! :)
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Comments
I use an internal HD, but I have a separate drive with backups of the content installers (except for the stuff downloaded through Connect) and back up my own files. If files you are usingare the only copy you might want to get a second drive and regularly update it from the first, so you have a fallback.
I just store all the base figures and outfits and enviroments that I use every day on a SSD so they load faster.
The rest is on a Western Digital Green and I also have a backup on a external HDD also from Western Digital.
What was the failed drive? Storage size? Manufacturer? How long did it last? How was it powered? By USB or wall plug?
Personally, I would never get anything larger than 1TB. More platters, move moving parts, more chance of failure.
Internal drives are always better, imho. They have plenty of power, and protected from external things like drops and bumps. Well, everything except lightning strikes. :)
Unfortunately, there is nothing that is foolproof. I personally prefer regular HDD's for data. I do have a couple of external enclosures that can accomodate either 2.5 or 3.5 " drives and both are powered by a wallwart. However, I rarely use them as I am using large towers with plenty of room for extra drives. I have no experience with those tiny external USB-powered drives, so I don't know how reliable they are compared to standard drives, but any HDD can fail and eventually it is probable that they will. However, even though I have had some drives fail, I also have drives that have lasted for years and years and still work, with the oldest getting retired for lack of capacity before ever failing. (The oldest that I have is a 1 Gig SCSI drive from about 1995 - still works!)
Short answer: a big one.
Usable answer - I'd do the largest internal drive I could afford for day-to-day use. And then get a pair of matching size external usb drives to put the backups on. My current system has 2 X 1 TB and 2 X 2 TB internal drives for data (I already had the 1 TB drives when I built the system 3 years ago) as well as a 500 GB SSD boot/swap drive. And 2 X 2 TB and 2 X 4 TB external usb drives. The system is running Windows 7 pro, and win7 tosses it's cookies at you if you try to build a system image backup disk on a drive larger than 3 TB. I also use this system to back up three others at home.
Alternate the backups - there is nothing worse than having your main drive die while in the process of replacing last week's backup with this week's.