[DM-MUG] External Harddrives

[kristau]

On 6/21/07, Victoria L. Herring <vlh at herringlaw.com> wrote:
> I did price the Hitachi Deskstar internal drives that fit the
> SilverSATA enclosure and drives I now have and the 500G would be
> around $120 [$4+ per G] and 750G at about $260 [$2+/G] - they're not
> raided and that's fine....they're mainly for backup storage and speed
> is not an issue - FW800 is fine.

Check me on this, but I believe the Deskstar line is Hitachi's low-end
desktop drive.  For backup, I'd recommend going with a more expensive
server-class of drives.  It is fine to bargain shop for your daily use
drives (as long as you back up regularly), but I wouldn't cheap out on
backup media.  I'm not familiar enough with Hitachi's lineup to tell
you which is their server class of drives.  Seagate has the Barracuda
line, and Western Digital has their RAID Edition line.

My rule of thumb is something like the following:

For desktop or non-mission-critical drives, shop for the best price
per gigabyte.

For mission-critical servers, shop for best price per warranty coverage.

In both cases, compare the same capacity drive across a few different
manufacturers.

> by the way, what sort of storage sleeves or protective stuff would I
> need when I take the drives out of the trays for storage?

Anti static bags with a ziploc type closure would be ideal.  Sorry I
don't have a source for those.  I'd also recommend picking up some of
those silica desiccant packs to place in the bags with the drives.
Place the whole lot in a snugly-fitted, foam-padded box of some sort
if you plan to transport them off site.  Most new drives come packed
in a box with a couple of inches of clearance or foam between all
sides of the drive and the box walls.  I would consider that the bare
minimum packaging requirement for drives with data on them -- more
being better.

-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

My GNUPG public key is available at http://www.kristau.net/public_key.asc