If you ever felt like you needed to carry 4TB of data around, Toshiba's got you covered Toshiba has pulled the covers off a 4TB portable 2.5-inch disk drive using 1TB/platter technology. The previous Canvio capacity high point was 3TB. Options with the new model are 500GB, 1, 2, 3 and 4TB. 4TB_Canvio_range 4TB Canvio model range What's inside could be an upgraded MQ03ABB300, a 3TB 2.5-inch drive with four …
generally, software put on those drives is shit. Either, because it's time-limited, or because it's shitty by design. Usually both. I don't remember EVER finding ANY such pre-loaded soft of any use. Format, move on, etc.
I have a 6TB My Book (the larger USB drive) that works very well. Then I tried one of their newer 8 TB My Book drives, and it would NOT work with rsynch at all - it hung up every time. Thinking it was a bad drive, Amazon sent me a replacement that had the same, exact problem. I ended up returning it, too.
Wound up with a Seagate 8TB USB (it's branded La Cie), and it works perfectly with rsynch and Clonezilla.
"I've found the WD MyPassport drives to be horribly unreliable. In my experience, 4 out of 4 drives have failed."
Odd.
I have at least 7 4TB Passport drives, 4 3TB Passport drives, and 5 2TB Passport drives.
Six of them live in my computer bag and follow me everywhere (4x4TB, 2x3TB).
None of them have ever failed.
The only portable USB HDD that has failed was an older (500GB) Adata.
I also have several 3 and 4TB Seagate drives, which work, but seem slower than the WD drives.
I can only speak for the one WD drive I have, but it has withstood my regimen, which included a full format and then transfer and reading of about 2.5 TB of stuff. I haven't put it through much more, so I cannot speak for its reliability. That said, I find that any time a drive gets a physical workout, it will either die within days or survive for the rest of time.
I think what you all have in common is the randomness of, er, randomness.
I've bought about 15 MyPassports, and 2 or maybe 3 have failed, so I guess you can add that to the sample.
If you want to talk about proper fail, ALL 8 of the 2TB hard drives in my SAS RAID enclosure for video editing have failed over the years! But then again, they do get properly pounded 24/7
The 4TB WD easydrive has been around for over a year now (I know; I bought a couple during a Cyber Monday sale and bought two more this year--for $20 less each than before). Having said that, these may not be 1TB/platter models, but in this case does it really matter?
And yes, Seagate and I have had bad experiences as well. I only use the ones I picked up for temporary storage these days since I've had most of them start to cut out on occasion.
At the prices they're going these days (the 4TB WD easystore was only $80 on a Cyber Monday sale), you can get at least two and mirror and rotate them. If one dies, odds are still passing fair you can get a replacement and re-mirror before the other one goes since you only use one of them at a time (meaning they'll have differing wear patterns that reduce the odds of simultaneous failure).
A second copy of all the data stored in a separate location and not actively used, updated occasionally? Sounds like a backup to me, unless you're ready to provide some technical dictionary definition for the word. Plus in my scheme I sync and rotate the devices occasionally to deal with mechanical wear.
Proper backups allow point-in-time recovery. What you have is periodic replication of the most recent state only.
Consider the following sequence:
1. you accidentally delete (or corrupt) a file, but don't realise immediately
2. you make your regular "backup"
3. you realise what you did in step (1)
You now have no way to recover the data.
That scenario applies to any backup scenario plan unless you keep ALL the backups basically for ever.
Only then are you guaranteed to get back to the point in time prior to you file corruption in your example.
Any form of rotation of backup stored media is going to be a potential liability
You might in your example find a corrupted old file you suddenly need and have to go back 5 or more years to find a backup of the pristine copy. So you are going to need maybe 7 years copies of weekly backups stored and available.
Besides, my typical use cases tend to make the idea of unintentionally AND unknowingly deleting something an unlikely proposition. I tend to be a bit of a packrat and am reluctant to delete anything, so If I'm deleting something, I usually know what I'm deleting. If I realize I've made a mistake, I usually realize it right away, so I have local undelete utilities on hand as the first resort, followed by the other drive. Besides, the material I intend to back up to drives like these tend to be of the WIRE type (Write-Infrequently, Read-Extensively), so things going in usually stay that way unless I'm undergoing a preplanned update of specific materials.
My backup drives are different sizes or, if the same size, different manufacturers to reduce the probablity of two failing at the same time. I have three copies of everything with the disks connected to my computer only when I update them. I also have a USB stick on my keyring with my absolutely must not lose data (1963 audio recording of my family members, old photos).
I've always been of the opinion that backups are not done unless I do them. That turned out to be fortunate at one company when the sysadmin deleted all my work while I was on holiday. He said he thought I had left the company. Fortunately, I had backups on computers in other states that he didn't know about. At another company, doing my own email backups was fortuitous when the email server crashed, taking all its data with it, and the backup tapes didn't work.
Fail in what way? As in you plug them in and they don't respond (even to reading) anymore? I know that SD cards and USB sticks have short write lives (they get the third- or fourth-string flash chips), and I have hammered a 16GB MicroSD to death before (in a dash cam), but apart from that?
Since nobody has said it yet, then I will...
That's a lot of space for a pr0n collection.
On a more serious note, I would like to say that any sensitive data on a portable device must be encrypted so that our government overlords...err law enforcement...can't access our deepest and darkest secrets.
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