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Best size for external hard drives

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Linny40

TK LADY VETERAN
Need more space for backups.

Been looking at External hard drives.
The largest hard drive i have is a 1TB but been looking on auctions sites etc and see there are now upto 4tb hard drives - not seen anything bigger. Seems the larger you look at the cheaper they are BUT what is best ?

Would you guys suggest getting one as large as that or maybe getting say 2 x 2tb hard drives.
I dont want something that is big and chunky!
plus a 500gb HD ive just bought is portable ( needed no electrical socket ) just USB

What is the quality like of the larger hard drives. I want to store photos and well as back up games/films etc onto these hard drives.
So another thing as i need them to have different formats can a large hard drive be split into different formats, or will i need 1 for each format i need.
 
Not sure what the best one is, but if you stick to a well know brand name such as Samsung, Western Digital or Seagate, you'll be fine, get the biggest one you want to get, as for the different formats, I'm assuming you mean having FAT32 and NTFS on one hard drive, you will just have to partion the drive and you can run both formats on the same drive.
 
thanks! yes most of my HD are seagate yes thats exactly what i mean need FAT32 and WBFS so as long as its a well known brand you'd say go ahead with a 2-4 tb
 
Linny40 said:
thanks! yes most of my HD are seagate yes thats exactly what i mean need FAT32 and WBFS so as long as its a well known brand you'd say go ahead with a 2-4 tb
Click to expand...

Can't see why not Linny, I'm not much for buying off makes brands of things, remember you get what you pay for :)
 
Linny you can have all the wbfs transfered to ntfs with wii backup manager and use wiiflow as your loader
 
sinno said:
Linny you can have all the wbfs transfered to ntfs with wii backup manager and use wiiflow as your loader
Click to expand...

dont confuse me lol! not dabbled with Wii for about a yr ...........cant you tell its christmas lol! But got so much now on my pc that i need to store it all externally. I do have other external drives but like to keep a copy of stuff on the pc or a hd connected to the pc as back up so if i want to look at what ive got i dont have to keep unplugging HD's from to and plug into pc to check.
My hard drives are different formats depending on what they are being used on. Films watched on consoles need to be fat32 but bluray is ntfs( i think) etc so if all films/games are backed up to the pc/hd i can just transfer to which ever drive its needed on.

God hope that lot makes sense - because i know what i mean lol


aaaaarrgg!!! just had to delete some as when trying to download got a message Aborted not enough room on disk ( or something like that) looks like a shopping trip 2mora

Me complicated.................. never!
 
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if you find something you like look at peoples reviews and hopefully that should go someway in helping you decide what you want to buy.
 
Linny, I find that most of the cr@p that I store on the external Drives is just that - cr@p. what you need to do is go through the drive and be ruthless, for instance if you have a movie that you watched 12 months ago and haven't even thought about watching it again - Delete it, if you watched a movie that wasn't great - delete it, if you burned a copy to disk and you still have the disk - delete it. photos - fair enough, they are all important in their own way, but make sure that you haven't got 2 or 3 copies of any folders.
I don't have any that are bigger than 500GB portable drives, I just delete crappy games and movies and music, etc at least once a year.
 
One of the most important questions is, "How much data are you prepared to lose if a drive crashes?"

I am a self confessed hoarder of TV series and documentaries, I've been collecting them for years & it's almost become a compulsion lol

Because of the time spent downloading them, the bandwidth used (that's massive) & the time spent organizing and renaming them to some sort of understandable format, they have become kind of precious to me, so hopefully they will be left for others to enjoy\laugh at long after I'm gone. Some of my collection might never be available to download in future should I lose it. For that reason I use only 1TB drives. You can call it eccentric if you like? but I Sync each individual drive with a second drive ensuring that if one should (and they are prone to) go belly up I have a duplicate. Should one of them ever die I can purchase another and immediately Sync with the backup drive so as I always have a better chance of recovery. To take the paranoia one step further, the backup drives are held in a different location to the master drives. It has kind of become a hobby with me I guess and it's so much easier to stream stuff instead of having box sets of thousands of DVD disc's lol

I guess it's down to how important your data is to you?

Have you ever looked online at the charges the professionals are looking for to retrieve data?

Outside of Solid state drives all drives have moving parts and or exceptionally prone to shock and failure, therefore I would not trust important data to larger drives such as 3 or 4 TB. 1TB drives are much easier handle and are also faster when it comes to duplicating them.
 
Gman496 said:
For that reason I use only 1TB drives
Click to expand...

Gman pretty well summed up my sentiments exactly with everything that he wrote. And for all those reasons, I will probably not go larger than 1 TB myself for the foreseeable future.
 
I also agree with gman and ferguj1 linny,i would suggest thou getting a dedicated drive for the wii,that will free up quite a bit of space,and 1 for the ps3,unfortunately i'm addicted to 2tb,theres 1 on the wii and the ps3,also a internal 2tb streaming my movies and tv shows,all western digital after my recent seagate problems
 
Thanks Guys. well think ill maybe get 1 or 2 TBs to store just games and films on.
Like Gman i do tend to hoard - ive learnt in the past that if you delete it then you'll want it and have to aquire it again - time consuming! But yes i do tend to download and try and put the finished film game in one file and get rid of all the rar files etc - which i realised took up a lot of space previously.
Thinking about my previous post all my avi and iso files are all on this pc so can be stored on 1 expansion drive and just copied from that to the drive they need to go on.
Problem is you start in this game and get carried away as Gman said.
Boys have their own drives so they can play films via xbox's and i have my HD with films so we can watch them via the bluray so technically have the same film backed up onto a) pc b) seperate hd's and wii has its own 1tb drive - Wheelo lots of the games on there really are so old and never played - so yup maybe i should restructure them!
So think ill wait now until next month and see what the "Big man" brings me maybe i can go purchase some 1 or 2 tb HD's :) and tell the kids no more downloads for a couple of weeks :)
Maybe i also need to look at the backup from my pc and tidy that up as well as some of the files on the pc that really are so old they are not needed. Thing is you look at small files and think they dont take up much space, but suppose if you do that to 100's of files it soon adds up!

Wheelo a bit like everything i suppose if its not been seen/played/used/worn etc for 12 months they do say dispose of it :)

God how did we ever cope before all this new technology
 
Yep Linny, it's a bit like cleaning out the toolbox lol The minute you throw away that connector, bit of wire or whatever? even though it's been in the tool box for the last year or more, you can be sure you'll need it within 48 hours & you'll be off to the local D.I.Y. yet again LOL!

Everytime I clean out the toolbox, I remove everything, decide what to dump (which is normally nothing) & end up putting it all back again only in a different order. A psychological cleanup I guess.... lol

Hard drives are no different I suppose? We do tend to keep an awful lot of crap? That said though, one mans crap is another mans gold?

Just on a side note too Linny, now or for the first 2 or 3 months of 2012 is the worst possible time to be buying HDD's. It will likely take that long before the criminal price hikes due to flooding start to decline.
 
Gman496 said:
Everytime I clean out the toolbox, I remove everything, decide what to dump (which is normally nothing) & end up putting it all back again only in a different order. A psychological cleanup I guess....
Click to expand...
sounds familiar!!! i do that with the wardrobe lol! move the clothes around so it LOOKS like ive had a clear out.

Well i did it i deleted over 100GB of films from pc - well they are on other devices lol!
as for HD's the likes of argoos have sold out of anything 500gb + in this area and i really have not got the time or energy to go shopping for something that realy is Not urgent - kids will have to be told no!! and put pc etc into hibernation for a while LOL Cant do online as now wont get it until about Jan what with holidays and by time they ship etc.
 
I myself have 1 2TB drive, 2 1TB drives, and 2 500GB drives.....so far. I forgot where it was, it may have been here a while ago, but there was a discussion about how large of an external drive would be good to buy, and the same question came up...."How much are you willing to lose when it fails?" Most of the consensus was agreed that anything more than 2TB may be a bit too big....for now. Give them a few more years, and the larger HDD's may be better built.
 
Linny, if you are running a 32 bit system, then the largest drive your OS can see is a 2 Tb drive. You need a 64 bit OS so that it can see a 2 + Tb drive (as 3 T or 4 T) . If using using a 32 bit OS, then the OS will format a 3 TB drive as a 1 Tb section and a 2 TB section (or any combination to arrive at 3 Tb). Using a 64 bit OS will allow you to manage drives larger than 2 TB easier (but it may not be worth the effort to reformat your pc with another OS just to get to use a larger than 2 Tb drive (easier). Just my thoughts.

Merry Christmas !
 
Thanks guys. Endo ive got a 64 with windows 7. Have looked and the price of a 2T is quite expensive so will probably get a 1Tb then get another 1 latervin the year as and when needed. Only need it now nad again for backup so decided a 1tb would be best
 
Linny40 said:
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->Thanks guys. Endo ive got a 64 with windows 7. Have looked and the price of a 2T is quite expensive so will probably get a 1Tb then get another 1 later in the year as and when needed. Only need it now and again for backup so decided a 1tb would be best<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
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