External enclosure and HDD for backup.....

[riversend3]

I am finally getting around to an external backup solution for my media on my computer (spurred by an upcoming move to NC and the desire to have a backup I can disconnect from any power supply in the house to protect from lightning strikes).

From what I have read in these forums and other places it looks as if a standard internal HDD mounted in an enclosure with a USB connection is the way to go for several reasons:

1 - stand-alone external HDDs do not appear to be as fast, or nearly as reliable, as the internal variety, and they might not work with future OS upgrades (such as a Seagate model I looked at that won't work with Vista 64 for some reason?)

2 - with the enclosure and the rapidly falling prices on standard HDDs I can continue to swap out drives to a single SATA enclosure

3 - cheaper solution

I can get a 500GB Seagate drive for about $70, so just need a good enclosure to mount it in. Any suggestions on that front? Is there an enclosure that will cut down on the noise coming out of the HDD?

Thanks, RE3

Another question: Why is there a limit on the space certain enclosures say they will support (such as "up to 1TB drives")? Why wouldn't any similar drive be supported (1.5TB, 2.0 TB)? A function of future driver support I suppose......

 

[Concillian]

size limitations are usually dictated by format capacities, and there isn't one very near. Likely they are limiting based on testing with available drives (1TB max plus the Seagate 1.5TB). I believe people have put the new Seagate 1.5 TB into enclosures that say up to 1TB with no ill effects.

1) retail external drives are essentially internal drives in a box just like you're talking about getting, plus software to make the copying easy. The speed limitations are often just USB (slower) or Firewire (faster, but still not full SATA speed). If you want fast you need eSATA, Firewire is decent. For normal backups USB is fine. Any solution will face these limitations and there is nothing unique about custom or retail solutions in this regard.

2) & 3) are the primary advantages. If you know you can manage the backups yourself, you don't need the retail software suite and the large markup for external hardware. It gives you flexibility for future exansion by just swapping the drive, though external connection technology may start moving towards Firewire or eSATA.

My experience is only with the enclosure I bought, and I pretty much just plugged in the drive and it worked:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16817193028
Didn't need any drivers or anything.