Why not portable HD for backups?
cmason
Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
So I have a 500GB Firewire drive from Iomega, and another 250 GB USB external drive. Both are definitely desktop drives, and have external power connectors with wall warts, and powerswitches. It is a pain to unmount and turn them off an nite, but they are a bit noisy (not the fans, just the vibrations). These are used for backup and as a primary photo drive. I also have 4 bare IDE drives as backup, that I use a little USB to IDE adptor with.
I also own a 250GB Western Digital Passport harddrive I use for work. But I got to thinking: this drive works off of USB power only, is completely silent, and puts out almost no heat. So why not use these instead of the larger desktop external drives, as primary and backup? The sale prices I am seeing on these are pretty good. And yes, I know I can get a 1TB bare drive for $100, but I am trying to eliminate 1) noise, 2) power switches, and 3) clutter.
Any reason why I should not use the portable hard drives in place of the 'desktop" drives?
I also own a 250GB Western Digital Passport harddrive I use for work. But I got to thinking: this drive works off of USB power only, is completely silent, and puts out almost no heat. So why not use these instead of the larger desktop external drives, as primary and backup? The sale prices I am seeing on these are pretty good. And yes, I know I can get a 1TB bare drive for $100, but I am trying to eliminate 1) noise, 2) power switches, and 3) clutter.
Any reason why I should not use the portable hard drives in place of the 'desktop" drives?
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Here I compare two typical drives, the WD My Book Essential and the WB Passport Essential:
My Book:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-External-WDH1U10000N/dp/tech-data/B000VZCEUI/ref=de_a_smtd
7200 RPM
Buffer: 16mb
1 Year Warranty
Passport:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Passport-Essential-WDME5000TN/dp/tech-data/B001F9LY14/ref=de_a_smtd
5400 RPM
Buffer: 2mb
3 Year Warranty
I was unable to find seek times on either drive, but I can guarantee that the portable is slower in that arena, too.
Thanks, yes, agree that price has always been the limiting factor.
But you can find 320GB WD Passports for $79, and smaller ones for as low as $60. The larger model WD or Seagate drives sell for about $120 for 500GB in comparison, so the smaller models are much more competitive than before.
By contrast, and Newertech 320GB HD in enclosure is $139, as is the similar Iomega Minimax, both Mac formatted. (I own a Minimax)
But it's a personal decision in the end. If you're not backing up very many GB each time and you're dealing with the limited throughput of USB 2.0 anyway, the speed difference may not be a big deal if you prefer the simplicity.
Off hand...I see no reason.
Things like write and read speeds are really neither here nor there when using strickly as back-ups. In case of internal drive failure...you are just going to copy the contents of the removable drive.
Interesting...I'm gonna watch this thread...in case I didn't consider something that I should have.
Great point iotashan...the buffer size seems a big differentiator here. I noticed that the slightly more expensive WD Passport Elite uses a 8MB buffer, though it too is a 5400 rpm drive.
I suspect that since I am not using these as anything other than storage drives, that the plate speed doesnt matter that much, since it is write speed more than seek speed that impacts my usage.
I currently use an 160 GB SATA drive in a cheapo USB enclosure as my primary photo storage file. It is the same drive I used on my PC before it died and I got my Mac, so it is there due to momentum. However Lightroom and Photoshop both have had zero issues with this drive and I am perfectly happy with it as a primary photo storage drive.
The other drive is a Minimax 500, running over FW400. So both of my drives max out at 400mb/s so I am not likely taxing the plate speed, though the buffer could be a concern. Perhaps the Elite would be better.
Now as pure backup though, the buffer will slow things, but shoot, I have time to wait on a backup to finish, and storing these is much easier than bare drives.
Since I use an iMac, an internal drive is not an option. I must use FW800, FW400 or USB. However, I do not use these as a main drive, therefore I am not concerned with using this a scratch disk, or as a primary OS disk, where thousands of 4k writes demand higher speed, as you pointed out.
I dont have anything that is even approaching 1TB. I have a 320GB main drive, and 500GB TimeMachine backup, split into two 250 partitions, and 160GB photo storage drive. 1TB sounds cool, but it would be a singular point of failure for what I need. (perhaps you are saying I need to do more bit torrents?
Test: copy representative files from my internal hard drive to the target backup hard drive. Record total time to copy files to each disk.
Methodology: I created an Automator action that copied a set of files that were representative of the kind of photo files I might be backing up. The action copied four folders of podcasts, totaling 465.2MB, in 26 files. It then copied 1 file that was 2GB in size, and finally signaled completion with a Growl notification. I started a stopwatch 1 sec after hitting 'run' on the action, and stopped it the instant the growl notification appeared. Granted, dedicated backup software may have done this faster, but the Automator script was very flexible.
Test hard drives:
A: Internal SATA 300GB Hard Drive
B: External 500GB Firewire 400 Iomega MiniMax Hard Drive
C: External 300GB USB 2.0 DIY Cheapo enclosure (WD Caviar) Hard Drive
Machine: iMac 2.16 Ghz Intel Core2 Duo, 3GB RAM, Mac OSX 10.5.6
Results:
Hard drive A: completed test in 2min 50 sec
Hard drive B: completed test in 2min 40 sec
Hard drive C: completed test in 3min 07 sec
Hard drive
So, from this, it shows that the small portable hard drive clearly suffers from speed issues, taking twice as long as the internal drive and the Firewire drive. USB 2.0 was not that much to blame, as the desktop drive in the DIY enclosure was comparible to the other drives, taking just about 30 sec longer than the SATA and FW drives.
A few other interesting bits: note that the source files were on Drive A:, and therefore the times for Drive A: are for this one drive reading and writing to the same drive. The FireWire drive had the best time overall, however, it failed the test twice, for unknown reasons, reporting 'connection errors'.
So, clearly the portable drive is slower, and by quite a bit. I of course did not use this drive for active files, only for backups, but I suspect it will suffer similarly. You should recall that the drive in this WD Passport is the identical drive found in many laptops, though 'higher end' laptops are often found with 7200 rpm 8MB cache drives vs the 5400rpm 2Mb drive in my Passport.
I would like to try this test with the higher end Passport Elite, as I suspect the larger cache would be a significant difference. There is also a Passport Studio that supports FW 800. In addition, Seagate offers similar portable drives that all have 8MB caches.
I think for simple backups, the smaller portable drives are an ideal form factor, but I think I will use them for backups and snapshots, not as working drives. Until I test these other models, (which won't happen unless I find a truckload of change somewhere, or the manufacturer sends me one), I think my next drive purchase will be a desktop drive, vs a small portable drive.
My primary (not local) backups happen through SugarSync which is also slow (because it involves uploading very large files over my DSL connection) but SugarSync handles it intelligently so I never mind.
While USB 2.0 is *supposed* to be 480mbps, it typically is slower than Firewire 400, as you've found out. Firewire 800, with a proper drive (like an array-based drive, say, a <a href="http://www.drobo.com/">Drobo</a>), would blow any USB drive out of the water.
I also believe that USB, as a protocol, actually ends up using some processing power to do it's work. Firewire, however, is nowhere near as taxing on the CPU.
That being said, keep in mind that there are (though not as popular) portable FireWire drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822215018 <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/mwink.gif" border="0" alt="" >
I switched to JungleDisk for off-site backups. It backs up to Amazon SC3, which some of you might recognize as the same storage engine that SmugMug utilizes for various stuffs including SmugMug Vault.
I also upgraded from AT&T DSL (6mbps down/756kbps up) to Charter Cable (20mbps down/2mbps up). Can't wait till Charter's Ultra60 launches here (60mbps down, 5mbps up).
Both purchased from buy.com -- here is a link to the product. Yesterday it was $89 after rebate. Right now it's $99 after rebate.
http://www.buy.com/prod/fantom-greendrive-1tb-usb-2-0-and-esata-external-hard-drive-2-year/q/loc/101/208503758.html
I use a program callend SyncBack to keep the two drive syncronized. At the end of the day I run SyncBack to copy changes from the primary to backup drive, then shut down the backup.
This system (LR + the two drives) works pretty good. Much better than the DVD backups I used to do.
By the way, the drives use very little power, run cool and are pretty much silent.
While USB and FW400 are roughly equivalent in throughput, FW has other advantages that reduce overhead,etc...and my test proved that out, barely. I suspect there were more impacts from the drives themselves, but without opening the FW enclosure, I will never know.
That being said, there is a huge difference between the two USB drives, and this is likely due to the hard drive itself. I doubt my cheapo desktop drive enclosure has any special bits to make it perform better than the Passport, so my view is that you are better off with a fast drive, than a FW drive. I suspect a slow drive in a FW enclosure won't get you much.
Actually, I use Mozy to backup my critical files, but have not moved to backing up my photos. (2GB is free at Mozy, otherwise it is unlimited for $50). Jungle Disk/Amazon just looked too expensive for 100GB images stored, with some 10GB per month upload, assuming I wish to back everything up as I do now. Again, this is compared to paying Mozy $50 a year for everything.
Thanks Art. I don't have the Vantex dock, but I do have a IDE/Sata to USB doohicky that I use for my longterm backups. I don't want to use it for active drives, as I am not real big on them being exposed (kids balls, toys and other crap are in the same room as my iMac), but it is a convenient way to do backups.
BeachBill: I have a similar set up. Actually I have a total of 6 harddrives: I have a 500GB system backup, managed by TimeMachine. I also have a 300GB photo drive. I take snapshot images (compressed to .dmg) of the entire photodrive once a month (using Carbon Copy) and store the image on a partion of the system backup drive.
I also take a complete copy of the photo disk, plus my Lightroom database, and literally copy it to 2 bare harddrives. One goes in the safe at the house, the other goes in a drawer in my office at work. I have two additional drives that are Carbon Copy snapshots of my system harddrive, again one in the safe, and one in the office drawer.
My original thought was to eliminate these bare drives and move to a handful of small protable drives, which are more sturdy under transport and much easier to store in a safe/file cabinet. Tedious yes, but I have lost everything once before, and will never face that again...even from a, God forbid, house fire.
I think that for these longterm backups, this is the way I will go. I will eventually get a 500GB portable, partion it, and store both photos and system images on one disk. But having faced hard drive failure before, I will always have two disks, and two different locations.
I use Time Machine with a 1TB external for my backups. Problem is, my backups are right next to my main computer, plugged into the same wall outlet. I really need to do something better and I've considered Carbonite for some of my backups (really critical stuff).
I do have a FireWire 400 enclosure that is bus-powered and I have an 80G drive in it. Problem is, that isn't really big anymore and I need a bigger drive in it. But I'm relatively sure the drive interface is outdated by now. Not even sure I could buy a larger drive for it these days.
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If it's PATA/IDE, it's technically outdated, but you can still get plenty of service out of it. If it's a 2.5" drive, you can still get up to 320GB. (see list).
Look at SugarSync.com before you sign up for Carbonite.
Paul, does Sugarsync allow multiple computer backup on one account? I really like Mozy, since it is $50 for unlimited data, however, you have to pay $50 per computer. I don't need to sync any of them, but having all the computers in the house backed up would be great.
The pricing seems to mention multiple computers, but is usually talking about sync, not backup.
I have the ADS API-808 Firewire enclosure: http://www.shopping.com/xPF-A-D-S-ADS-2-5-Pyro-Drive-Kit-for
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One account, as many computers as you want. SugarSync really is more about Sync than backup, but there's no reason you have to use it that way. You set up the desktop client software on all your machines and choose (for that machine) what folders you want to have synced. After that initial setup you can also choose what folders you want synced down.
Example: All computers have "My Documents" synced. This means that the My Docs folders on all computers will be identical (I have it this way for home, work, and laptop). As soon as you save a file it is instantly uploaded to the cloud and synced back down to the other two computers.
Home-PC has "Photos" folder synced. It is synced up to the cloud but NOT down to the other computers (because they don't have lightroom and I don't want them on the other PCs).
I'm pretty sure you could customize the workflow of SS to do whatever you wanted. The only "catch" perhaps is really large files that change frequently, such as my Lightroom DB file. Rather than having that synced every time I save it's better to set it to either sync manually (when I tell it to) or once at day (at 2 AM because it takes a while to upload).
What we refer to as "backing up," SugarSync would call "syncing to the cloud."
You can always sign up for the 45 day (10GB) free trial to see if it would work for you.
I guess if its power consumption on its spec sheet is comparable to the lower capacities it should work. I can say that I have a 120GB 2.5" Western Digital running off of bus power in an OWC enclosure.