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Saturday, August 19, 2017

Backup Storage

I mentioned a while back that my 1TB external USB hard drive had failed.  I am now backing up to my 4TB external hard drive.  I had some weird hiccup with last night's Windows 7 security upgrade and suddenly became terrified of losing everything.  I currently have my wife's PC backing up to a spare 1TB external drive.

While searching for another 4 TB drive, I noticed for just a bit more money, WD 4TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage - NAS, so Ethernet instead of USB.  This lets me backup both PCs through the network.  and access my files remotely as well.  I assume that Gigabit Ethernet will beat USB 3.0 on speed.  Anyone think of a reason not to go this way?

2 comments:

  1. usb3 is significantly faster than gigabit ethernet. but that's not relevant, because in either case you're almost certainly just writing to a single inexpensive hard drive, which will have a maximum write speed of somewhere around 100-120 megabytes/second. Easily saturated by gigabit ethernet.

    if you're really keen to keep your data safe, cobble together an old computer, give in a pair of large hard drives of the same size, and slap FreeNAS on it. bit more effort, but it'll solve problems you didn't know you have yet.

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  2. That's the one I have and it works well for me. When I bought it I noted that it was about the same price with the 2 red drives as the drives alone would have cost. It is well supported by WD.

    Greg

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