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.

I recently got a terabyte and I can not put my OS on it. It keeps coming up as BOOT MGR is missing. Won't even go through the install at all. I already have a 500g hard drive on my computer, and there is about 100g left. Was wondering if it's my computer that can't handle it or something else. Anyone who can help would be gr8. Need more space on my computer. Checked around on the net and can't come up with a answer.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Has the drive been formatted?

I boiled it down to getting a Samsung or Hitachi 1 Terabyte internal hard drive to replace my Seagate Barracuda 750GB and use it as a backup to store in a safety deposit box (photos, documents, etc.) for safe keeping.

From what I've been reading, it's about reliability, speed, heat output, energy consumption, and warranty. It's so complicated. Please help me figure which one is best.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Sounds like you have a bad case of analysis paralysis. Pick one.

I bought a Seagate 1 TB SATA internal drive last month, encased it in an external USB enclosure - though it does need to be AC powered by an adapter - been working OK, but of course, it's just been a month.

I made 4 primary partitions on it. 1st pri is a 2 GB I use as Windows' Temp folder partition. 2nd & 3rd pri I intend to use to install Linux on. On the 4th pri I made 4 logical drives of 220 GB each for video files, image files, binaries (setups of programs & applications etc) and finally, music & ebook collection on the last logical drive.

Populated it by transferring data off an Iomega 250 GB external which was causing write errors. Already the video files partition is 67% filled.

Together with this video converteror
iPod video converter to

converter video would be better

Hi Bob
I caught the tourbus when it first started and haven't got off yet! Thanks for all the effort.

Re TB drives; I lost a system this week and have added a terabyte drive. This gives me a second location to store system images. I have an online Maxtor 1TB as well, together with a 300G USB drive.

This gives me two large areas on which to store duplicate copies of my Acronis images, and the 300 allows me to keep the latest images off site.

I'm a consulting Engineer which with important data going back 10 years and I couldn't afford a major data loss - much less the pain of re-creating systems and apps.

Hi Bob this is very useful information I have build about 4 pc's for myself and one thing that I hated is going up in hdd space I would fill them up and than forced to get a bigger one so my last build 4 years ago I stared with a 250gb and guess what is full jut on my Ipod I have over 15,000 songs and with that comes videos , movies and pictures so I decided to have my 250gb and 2 500gb , Ihope that should be enough but with the advent of HD I do think 1tb will not be enough !!

p.s I love all the great info you put out there for free . I'm glad I found your site !!

I have a Lenovo Y510 Notebook that has a "one key"
recovery button which was pushed incorrectly by the user, instead of the power button. The computer will not start properly now.

The only message you get when the computer boots up is
"bootmgr is missing"
"Press Ctrl+Alt+Del o restart"
PS - When I push the "one key" recovery button now
it warns me that it will repartition the C: drive to recover??? Not something that sounds good!

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Bruce

I bought a Western Digital 2TB "MyBook Mirror" about a year ago. Set it for the default RAID and it's run flawlessly ever since. Yes it will fail as all hard drives eventually do. It has two mirrored copies and the odds of both going at the same moment are zero! (I keep spares). Drop in a fresh drive and it rebuilds.
Hard drives are consumable products like ink cartridges with a MTBF of around three years. Once one gets their head around that fact you will save yourself a lot of grief.

I say bring back the 40 GB drive. I like to keep my boot hard drive small to allow for periodic imaging which saves a lot of time and trouble in the event of its failure. Larger drives are used for file storage and those files are synced to another system that acts as a simple file server with a pair of drives mirrored using a raid card.

I realize that there are a lot of slim line systems that do not allow room for more than one hard drive, but as I build my own, I ensure that the cases I use are able to hold several drives.

I am going to buy an external 1 TB hard disk since I am using my computer to download bulky softwares and videos from you tube . But people say 1 TB hard disks are very prone to failures and crashes. So it makes me more confusion to buy 1 TB hdd, please help me to choose whetehr I should buy a TB hdd or just 500 GB hdd.