Terabyte Hard Drives - Comments Page 1

Hi Bob - I've got an iomega 1 TB external HD and it's performed without issue for the 8 months or so I've had it. I run an incremental backup of my main HD every night and currently have just a little more than 150 GB available on the external HD.

I have an abundance of long videos (100+ hours) and thousands of hi-res pictures for my work. 1 TB is about to be too small for me. :)

Excellent overview Bob! I especially enjoyed the way you delved into the differences between RAID versus a single drive. Thanks!

As I am an avid collector of movies a terabyte hd is a God send to me. I now have four 1 terabyte drives hooked to two computer systems and have a 5th on order just to store all my movies (present & future) as well as the 18000+ songs I have collected over time.

So far, so good with no failures. But I do keep careful track of what's on an individual drive so if it does fail (Oh, please! I hope not!) at least I know what I have to replace.

check out this link http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/terabyte-territory/2 from a few years back to get a perspective in terabytes

Just reasently installed a 1TB internal hard drive(Seagate)and divided it up into six partitions. As a novice I found installation and use to be quick and simple. Saw very good response time moving files into their respective partitions. Haven't tried defraging any yet but I'll continue to make regular backups of each partition; just in case.......8>{

Hi Bob: Your overviews are excellent !
I have a la LaCie Terabyte HD where I load my videos, and it's working flawlessly, for the last 4 months.
It's perfect for me.

@Tom Smith - you should look into getting a Drobo so that you don't have to worry about drive failures.
I currently have a Drobo with three 750Gb drives and one 250Gb. It is wired into my router with the NAS kit that they sell for it. I use it as my bulk storage unit for pictures & videos and for the incremental backups (using Acronis) that I run on all of the computers (2 DTs, 1 LT) on my home network. It takes care of defragging and monitors the health of all my drives.
It is a bit pricey (about $400 w/o the drives), but well worth it in terms of securing my data and not having to worry about it. It will also take up to four, 4-Terabyte drives.

@Greg - why all of the partitions?!? There is really no good reason to partition large drives anymore...

Thanks for the post Bob. Very informative. My local HDD supplier informs me that ATA disks are a thing of the past? So you have to have a SATA interface of some description. Could you possibly update us on this.

EDITOR'S NOTE: It's true that new computers mostly use SATA. But there are plenty of older computers around with motherboards that need the IDE interface.

CAUTION- TB drives present an interesting concern!
ALL DRIVES FAIL! Like sump pumps, all drives fail it is only a question of when. Backup is NOT the prime issue but RECOVERY is. The bigger the drive, the longer to backup and even longer to recover.
Based on decades of "failure" experience, the OS drive should not be on a partitioned TB drive. The OS drive should be on a drive that is easy to backup and even faster to recover! TB drives are great (I have many) but almost every TB drive (internal and external) is synced to a backup TB drive. When a TB drive fails, I buy another and then re copy from the good one. I am out some time, but do not loose data. Today, storage is almost unlimited and almost free but it will fail so RECOVERY is the key action that MUST be tested so when you need it, you will be ready!

I should get a terabyte drive. I've been using my computer to record and watch HDTV the past three seasons and 500 gig drives fill up way too quickly. It turned out I'd keep more of the recorded shows than I expected to: because it seemed as if those shows would never make it to home video release in DVD let alone hi-def.