A thread for boring computer questions.

In the past year I have bought two Seagates, five WDs and three Samsungs. The reason I bought three Samsungs is that every single one of them died prematurely because they are made by the cack-handed goons at Samsung.

here's the thing

the drive lights up when i plug it into the computer, but it makes no sound

that may be bad news but try it in an enclosure or another machine first

it got no love from the ps3... i guess i'll invest in an enclosure. i'll need a new HD anyway so i guess i'll get another internal too so it wont be a total waste of cashish if it doesnt work.

good plansh

yeah if you just need massive storage that need not be particularly portable, an enclosure and a bunch of 3.5" OEM internal drives is a very good way to go.

what do we think of the caviar green line?

should i get a mega-enclosure?

fuck usb2.0 i'm going fw800 this time.

should i get this?

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=54483&vpn=EZQE61302&manufacture=Ezquest

stick 2 1tb drives in it?

will 2tb drives work do you think?

and then do i use it for... time machine? or superduper backup? or just to store my photos/videos off my laptop?

i cant wait till someone figures out a way for me not to have to think about this stuff all the time

if you're looking to spend "mad bank" then a NAS enclosure with 4 drives and RAID is "mad upgradable" and good from a data security POV. that's going to be ~1000 units of currency.

what is a mega-enclosure?

fw800 ftw.

xp

by mega i mean a RAID

not an expert on this stuff, but that seems kind of expensive for what it is.

do you understand what different RAID levels mean?

i have to go and watch that shitty sofia coppolsh movie now, some other nerd will cover for me, i trust

i do not

s1ocki if you're gonna go that way i will strongly rep for synology products, specifically this -

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS211j/index.php

which is wayyy more than just an enclosure - it'll let you log in remotely, FTP, serve web pages, DL torrents, etc

it's a way of life

if you set it up in RAID 1 you'll get data redundancy (everything is mirrored, so if one drive fails you can restore from the other one).. of course, caek would have you then back this up weekly to another external drive which you store at your mother's house or in an underground lead-lined bunker

i use mine to store all my music and to take my time machine backups (you can use it as a time machine target)

here's my issue.

i want a good backup of my laptop HD for obv reasons

but i also deal wiht a lot of big media files - HD video, RAW photo etc, which i have redundantly scattered around various drives

so i need at least one backup hd for my laptop (i have one, running time machine)
as well as at least one external for media files
as well as ANOTHER to back up the media drive

so many hard drives
it's fucking annoying

well, caek would have me drawn and quartered for saying so, but i accomplish all that with a two-bay NAS

- create a backup volume on it (for time machine)
- create another volume called "music", another called "video", another called "photos", etc
- and... i don't back it up. i probably should. but since it's RAID 1, if one drive fails it's no biggie. get another drive of the same size, pop it in, and you're back to full redundancy in an hour or two

you can mount the volumes via AFP, SMB or NFS

i guess a two-bay nas with 2 2TB drives in it?

i don't think a mirrored 1TB drive would be enough for my data-hungry needs

Storage is so cheap atm. The 2Tb I bought yesterday cost $145, which is $145 in CA$ and $145 in US$.

*hangs, draws and quarters tracer*

> $145 in CA$ and $145 in US$

and probably £145

£145 would get you a 1.2Mb floppy these days.

Raid isn't a backup: what if some installer goes mental and deletes the Pictures folder? An iTunes installer wiped out music folders stored on external volumes, once.

Eek. Don't put your iTunes Music folder on your external drive, is what I'd say. I mean YMMV obv but I feel pretty safe since there's no apps or system files at all on there.

I do Time Machine backups on the Mac, sod-all on the Ubuntu (nothing important lives there anymore) and wholesale drag & drop all my video media across to a dedicated ext hdd.

But stet you're right - RAID 1 is protection against physical drive failure (i.e. what happened to s1ocks) but not anything else.

What if an installer went mental on your NAS and you didn't notice for a month? In that case you'd really need Time Machine, or something like it. But can you even make Time Machine happen between two external drives?

I'm pretty sure you can, because I'm pretty sure mine keeps trying to do it. If your ext hdd is big enough Time Machine tries to annexe it, but you can whack a hidden file in the root telling Time Machine to bugger off.

Yes but if the drive you want to back up isn't connected physically, but lives on the network..

Oh, I dunno then.

> sod-all on the Ubuntu

i'm using Dirvish for backup. it's slightly friendlier than raw rsync or rsnapshot without being the gui-fest that is TimeVault.

Oooh ta, I'll have a crack. Got sick of trying to find a package that worked.

package = GUI package

guys what are our thoughts on DROBO... sounds like, though a bit pricey, it could do what i want it to do?

had thought readynas was better(cheaper?) than drobo? I don't have either, though I have been messing round with Openfiler recently, seems good so far

for local/fw drives, I've been using G-Techs

the advantage of the synology boxes is really in the software and admin interface, really. you can create any number of volumes on the fly, create users with difft levels of access, quotas, etc., do UPnP, fileshare, FTP, etc - screenshots here:

http://www.techspot.com/review/169-synology-ds409p/page4.html

(that's a different, more expensive box but the software is basically the same across all their models)

i dont think i really to do much of that stuff, as cool as it sounds...

really need to

well the budget 2-bay synology is $200 so if the drobo or whatever is cheaper then, yeah! but i've found it's really nice to be able to get a file off of it when i'm, say, not at home. and it works reallly well as a torrent seedbox uh, media thing.

the four-bay drobo is about $100 more expensive... hrm

FOUR! daaaaaamn.

http://www.drobo.com/resources/drobocalculator.php

UPDATE

i didnt do anything and my drive is still uh.. 'sleeping'

but i found an old backup of my itunes library dating to one year ago on another drive, so at least i rescued a bunch of tunes

as you were

http://blog.nj.com/giants_scene/2008/02/paradeparade.JPG

http://limelighttalent.org/Images/index_bow_stage.jpg

i thohght abut getting a drobo but i heard the device itself is not too reliable

im hearing its slow which is not really good for my purpz