I need suggestions for reliable external hard drives

[Fardringle]

One of the offices I contract with has been using a TR3 tape backup system for a couple of years and it has worked well, but many of the tapes are starting to fail due to age and heavy wear from daily backups. The boss asked me to look into the possibility of using external hard drives as backup storage instead of buying new tapes. I could just go out and buy a handful of the cheapest drives I can find but since this is for someone else, I'd like to get a second or third opinion first.

Speed and size of the drives really don't matter. A full backup of their entire system is less than 50 GB, and the backup could take all night if it really needed to, so as long as the drives are at least 100GB (for growing room) and very reliable, I don't care if they are slow. I would prefer to use drives that are powered from the USB port simply because the person in charge of changing the tapes/drives isn't the brightest bulb and she would probably forget to plug in an external power cord and then complain to me because it doesn't work. If the most reliable drive(s) uses an external power source, that is fine since reliability of the drives is the primary concern.

If I can get drives that meet these conditions for $100 or less that would be ideal. More than that and the boss will probably say to just get new TR3 tapes for $60 each.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[taltamir]

get one of those racks and a few extra trays:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...3&bop=And&Order=RATING

The rack is a 20-30$ piece that sits in a 5inch bay and allows you to hot swap 3.5 inch HDD as long as they are sitting in a tray. The trays cost abour 12-15$ each... and then get as many hard drives as you want (which should be less then 60$ per drive for a size similar to the tape)

 

[Fardringle]

I appreciate the suggestion. That looks pretty cool, but anything that needs to be mounted in a drive bay in the server is not an option. The only "available" bays in the server are physically part of the SCSI RAID hot-swap array so there is no place to mount one of those IDE hot-swap racks.

 

[myocardia]

Just buy new tapes. Hard drives are notoriously prone to failure, and this dimwit would actually have to learn to use new backup software, since Windows Backup doesn't/won't use hard drives. BTW, who spends $1,500-2,000 for a tape drive, then complains about the cost of the tapes?

 

[Fardringle]

Originally posted by: myocardia
Just buy new tapes. Hard drives are notoriously prone to failure, and this dimwit would actually have to learn to use new backup software, since Windows Backup doesn't/won't use hard drives. BTW, who spends $1,500-2,000 for a tape drive, then complains about the cost of the tapes?

I neglected to mention this, but they use Veritas Backup Exec, which will write backups to just about anything, including external hard drives, so the software is not an issue. Backups are scheduled automatically anyway, so the person that swaps the tapes doesn't ever touch the software, she just swaps the tapes every day.

The owner is not complaining about the cost of the replacement tapes. He just wants me to find out which external hard drives are a viable and reliable option since tapes in general are one of the least reliable forms of storage media unless they are very carefully stored and handled. Also backups saved to a hard drive can be recovered on ANY computer whereas the current tape backups can only be restored on a machine with a matching tape drive so external drives would be a significant upgrade to their disaster recovery options if something should happen to the physical server (like a fire or flood).

As far as spending a lot of money for the tape drive itself, it was included as very inexpensive upgrade (actual cost of the drive was under $200) when they purchased the server from Dell two years ago and if they do switch over to a different storage media they can probably sell the used drive to pay for the cost of quite a few new hard drives.

 

[COPOHawk]

I will kick in my .02 about this.

I have recently installed about 4 Win Server 2003 boxes (for clients) that use Symantec Backup Exec (ver 10d or 11d, while the Veritas was 9 and earlier) and have turned to external hard drives.

This mean backing up to a number of 750 GB drives and swapping them out daily. Some clients preferred to have 3 drives, swapped out daily, so that 2 were always off-site...while one customer only wanted 1 drive with no off-site backup due to cost.

I use Western Digital drives and have tested all of them extensively (using WD Desktop Diagnostics) with 2 DOA out of 10 purchased since 12/07.

So far, so good.

HTH...

 

[taltamir]

you can get an eSATA card and plug that HDD tray externally... or actually, with eSATA you could plug drives directly without an enclosure... but i wouldn't risk it (risk of short, jostle, etc).

You know what.. just get regular external drives. it is really NOT that hard to plug it in and back it up.

 

[homerunkevin]

Originally posted by: COPOHawk
I will kick in my .02 about this.

I have recently installed about 4 Win Server 2003 boxes (for clients) that use Symantec Backup Exec (ver 10d or 11d, while the Veritas was 9 and earlier) and have turned to external hard drives.

This mean backing up to a number of 750 GB drives and swapping them out daily. Some clients preferred to have 3 drives, swapped out daily, so that 2 were always off-site...while one customer only wanted 1 drive with no off-site backup due to cost.

I use Western Digital drives and have tested all of them extensively (using WD Desktop Diagnostics) with 2 DOA out of 10 purchased since 12/07.

So far, so good.

HTH...

CopoHawk, We are using tapes as backup and also testing out DPM 2007. I was curious how you are able to have 3 drives where it's hot swappable and change out the hd?

Thanks

 

[Fardringle]

Originally posted by: taltamir
You know what.. just get regular external drives. it is really NOT that hard to plug it in and back it up.

That's what I want to do, and goes back to my original question. Which external hard drives are the most reliable?

 

[RebateMonger]

I'm hesitant to recommend ANY commercially available external hard drives. Most have no cooling fan and no warnings of over-temperature.

I've been using Granite Digital's removable SATA trays for a couple of years now with zero failures of trays and drives. These have been filled with Seagate 7200.10 drives. Granite Digital (and others) make external housings that hold the trays, too. I haven't used any of the external housings, and have heard rumors of "power issues" with external SATA housings. But I can say that when I've put the trays INSIDE the servers, they've been great. They have audible alarms for over-temperature for the housing and under-speed for the fans.

Generally, removable hard drives have been a zero-issue backup system (other than an occasional failing USB housing). I had a LOT more issues with tapes and tape drives when many of my clients had those. None of my current clients have functioning tape drives anymore.

My current "beginning" instructions to clients is to purchase at least three hard drives in trays, plus a couple of extra trays. Granite Digital sells padded cases for $10 that they can use to carry the drive trays offsite and for storage. They keep one tray attached to the Server and keep two trays offsite. (These are minimum quantities. I also recommend purchasing additional drives/trays for keeping "Archival" backups of the server as time goes on.)

 

[pugh]

the mark-up on the sata drives at that site are insane. 499.00 for a 1tb drive?? Are these things none regular consumer drives or something?

 

[Fardringle]

I'll take a look at the Granite Digital removable trays. I do like Seagate drives so that sounds like a winner to me. Thanks.