Should I get a hard drive?

[Rakuen Growlithe]

I was thinking of getting a 1tb external hard drive for my laptop instead of backing everything up on cd's and dvd's. Here's how I see it now:

HDD:
Pro:
convenient (everything is always available and can be edited in real time)
less clutter (smaller than piles of dvd's and less little parts)
If it breaks data can usually be recovered
Con:
All my eggs are in one basket
more expensive

DVD:
Pro:
cheaper (but not by much)
Easier to transport and lend out
Con:
Lost data is harder to recover
can get lost or scratched
Not all drives read things as easily
Data only lasts so long before they need to be recopied

So that's some of what I'm thinking of right now and I'd appreciate some thoughts on this. I'm mainly thinking about this because I keep running out of space on my laptop and I have about 300 gigs of stuff on dvds.

[DesertYote]

Just got an advertisement for 1TB HD's for about $70 USD. Amazing how low prices have gotten!

'Yote

[Rakuen Growlithe]

Wow. I haven't seen any that low around here. If I had I wouldn't have hesitated to get it :p

[Dracius]

To be honest, I would never consider DVD's over the option of a 1TB hard drive. Its just far more versitle to move around 1TB of data instead of lugging over CD-cases worth of DVD's.

[Wolfie-DMX]

Have to agree, A External HDD will be MUCH better than optical media.

Especially if you store optical media like I do, they dont last for more than a year hehe.

Have a look around at major resalers, Like Rectron or Esquire etc. I dont know if you need a account, but check as they are cheeper than the normal computer guys. Last time I saw, a external 1TB was going at about just under R1000.00

Good luck,

[Rakuen Growlithe]

Necro much? This thread was almost a year old this month. Come on Dracius, you know I got the hard drive. I bought it from you.

As an update I did get a hard drive. A number of months ago. It's over half full now I think. I might have to start think of getting a second one.

[Wolfie-DMX]

Like lmfao,

I didnt even notice. lawl! My bad >.<

[anoyomouse]

Zombee thread!

*giggles*

well, now that you can get 2tb drives, i guess the question of DVDs is kinda pointless, DVDs are less reliable than HDDs as well

anyways, if you want puppy you can always lock the topic now, since it's done with

[Rakuen Growlithe]

I could. I just don't see the point in locking threads that aren't troublesome. You could even use it to discuss hard drives in general if you want.

I know someone said they didn't like the idea of 2tb drives as if anything goes wrong that's a lot of data to have in one place.

[Wolfie-DMX]

Thats why you monitor the status of a HDD, to make shure its health is ok. People use to say this about Stiffy's 10 years ago LOL.

I partition my HDD into different parts, but it might be good to keep it one partition if you use it for backup. I use my HDD for 2 different perposes, thus the 2 partitions...

Good luck,

[anoyomouse]

That's why you have things like RAID 5 ...

i got my office a Segate BlackArmor 440 NAS Server (4TB) it has 4x1tb drives in it all RAID5d, and 2.87 GB accesable, if a drive goes phut, replace drive, no data loss ... of course paying like R8500 Ex VAT for the box isn't much fun x.x