Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Pro Business Discussion => Topic started by: beebibi on November 13, 2013, 07:22:41 pm

Title: advice on external beg fast hard drives for backup
Post by: beebibi on November 13, 2013, 07:22:41 pm
Hi, I own home media network external hard drives from Iomega T12APK, 3 TB (usable 2.7TB) for backup too slow for me. Would    appreciate some input...
Thanks

Best Bee
Title: Re: advice on external beg fast hard drives for backup
Post by: langier on November 13, 2013, 08:15:27 pm
How fast is the port on your computer? That may be the bottleneck or part of it, especially if you are running FW 400 or USB 2.x. Also, other devices on that interface can slow things down. Just because you have a port that's labeled as such, seldom will it perform at the full spec of the standard. Also look into the speeds of your drives. The drives you have may be 5400 and that could be part of the slowness. The size and quantities of the files you are backing up can also be a factor. If the drive is NAS, that's probably the main issue with speed.

If you can upgrade your computer, consider newer interfaces, such as eSata, USB 3, FW800. USB 3 and eSata will probably get you the biggest speed boost for the $. Thunderbolt, even though it rates faster and seems easy to configure is just so expensive for the drive boxes, IMO.

For my own system, I'm running 2-3GB 7200 rpm drives in an external eSata box with a port-multiplier inside my Macpro. No complaints with speed and I'm backing to two external drives in two JBOD boxes so I have redundancy (knuckle-head style, I drag the same folder of images to each drive as I've completed metadata, editing and backup to DVD of all the files).

If $$ isn't an object, start thinking about using SSD devices for your system. They are pricy, but have no moving parts so dropping them and other issues of the mechanics aren't an issue, but there's always some other problem that we'll have to worry about.

Bottom line is that the drive is just one of the many factors involved with overall system speed and as always, YRWV.
Title: Re: advice on external beg fast hard drives for backup
Post by: Steve Weldon on November 13, 2013, 11:55:37 pm
You need to be a lot more specific.  What is the size of your archives and at what rate do you add to it monthly? 

Also include your budget, your current computers in your home that require backup, what ports they have, if any PC slots are open, and for the sake of reference what are you now using and it's speed?