URGENT - Source for Reasonably-Priced Disk Drives

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 12:26 am

Possibly more of a Sales & Wants item, but anyone know where I can get a couple of 300GB+ drives at a reasonable price?

I had two mirrored drives which I used for data - one pegged out just before the Spring Fair, and now the other one's just died the death (thankfully managed to back up my recent data changes before it gave up the ghost). The pair that have failed were Deskstars, if that's any help.

Spit · Post by **Spit** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 12:30 am

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductI ... tID=736216

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 12:33 am

Cheers, Steve. Can they be mirrored?

Spit · Post by **Spit** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 12:57 am

I'm afraid I'm too long out of IT to be able to answer that one honestly.

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 1:20 am

Pair of us in it...

w00dward · Post by **w00dward** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 7:45 am

Moglet, do you want internal or external? IDE or SATA?

When I get to work I'll put different examples up.

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 5:54 pm

Hi Paul!

I have two internal SATA drives in the RAID array at the moment:

Model: Hitachi Deskstars HDS72404KLS (372.6 GB).

Base unit's a Dell Workstation (can't remember model no.)

Open to suggestions about what's best to use. I think that the deskstars are very prone to heat problems, and I'd be disinclined to use Hitachi drives again. I'm a great fan of Western Digi drives for reliability. Feel like adding myself to the numpty list for my lack of technonouse these days. To think I used to build Banyan and Notes Servers for a living...

w00dward · Post by **w00dward** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 11:03 pm

Ok, internal SATA.

I agree Western Digital are very reliable drives. I get my gear from either Dabs or Novatech.

Dabs are currently doing SATA 500GB Western drives for £65 and a hard drive manufactured for raid at £77.
Link

How was the raid array configured? Was it a raid 1 or 0?

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 11:16 pm

Paul, you're a topper!

The Deskstars are the first drive failures I've had (with the exception of very occasional failures on some of the servers when I worked for Compaq) in over 20 years! All the drives I've had on my own machines were Western Digi - recommend 'em to anyone.

While we're at it, you by any chance know anyone that can access data on a failed drive? I've got all my mission-critical stuff backed up, but I've got a lot of historical customer picture data that I'd like to try retrieving if it was cost effective. And while I'm being a technotart, can you recommend a decent backup system (say 50-100GB capacity)?

w00dward · Post by **w00dward** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 11:26 pm

When I get to work tomorrow I'll have a look through my directory and see if there are any recovery specialists.

Is the hard drive totally buggered? Does it spin up when powered? Can you get a directory of it or mount it?

As for backups we are giving the mobile users USB hard drives. At the moment we're giving the Iomega one-touch drives. They have backup software with them and its easy to configure. Once configured you press the button on the front of the drive and your backup starts.

Something like this

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 11:36 pm

Cheers, matey!

When I look at the drive status under XP raid configuration, it recognises one drive - gives the option to "mark as normal" (whatever that means) - and the other one comes up as "missing." I'd need to check if either of they are spinning up.

That's a knacky backup drive! Can it be used to restore data to a laptop? (I restore critical data backed up from my desktop onto my laptop to ensure that I have a reliable, readable backup of my most important data.)

I really appreciate your help on this, Paul!

Roboframer · Post by **Roboframer** » Tue 12 Feb, 2008 11:46 pm

I've got a Maxtor one touch thingy - 750 gb - no idea what it does but it assured me it had done it!

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Wed 13 Feb, 2008 12:37 am

Roboframer wrote:...it assured me it had done it!

Technology's probably advanced some since I left the professional arena, but I've seen many people learn the hard way that it's one thing to have a backup, another thing entirely whether it'll restore successfully. God be with the days when I used to do onsite maintenance work: never went to a customer site without at least two of every disk needed (to be sure, to be sure

). In the good ol' days of 8" floppies, site visits were something of a Herculean labour!

As you guys are probably starting to realise between this and my CMC questions, the Mogster's a bit of a paranoid android when it comes to anything computer-related!

JFeig · Post by **JFeig** » Wed 13 Feb, 2008 2:53 pm

I still use Norton's Ghost for a full clone of my hard drive

http://shop.symantecstore.com/store/sym ... rrency.USD

deejay · Post by **deejay** » Thu 14 Feb, 2008 5:33 pm

Staples do a 350 gig external drive for about £40

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Thu 14 Feb, 2008 11:24 pm

Thanks all for your responses!. Apologies for delay in acknowledgement, but I could not get online last night. (For some reason, my broadband connection drops every 24 hours or so, and I can't get back online without a reboot. With my current system problems, I didn't want to risk rebooting the PC until I had restored all my critical data onto my laptop and made sure it was working properly. Sheesh! No wonder I left the ops world behind me...

)

Post by **prospero** » Thu 14 Feb, 2008 11:36 pm

Moglet wrote:...... I could not get online last night.

Thank Gawd for that! Thought I had gone deaf.

(or should that be blind?)

Roboframer · Post by **Roboframer** » Thu 14 Feb, 2008 11:42 pm

Yeah, well, whenever you can't get online - drop me an email, I worry!

Hoops · Post by **Hoops** » Thu 14 Feb, 2008 11:59 pm

Moglet,

If you're happy with an external, Maplin are doing a 750gb Maxtor drive (seagate) for 110 stg- should hold your customer details!
USB job, so no effort.
Hoops

Moglet · Post by **Moglet** » Fri 15 Feb, 2008 12:44 am

Hi Hoops!

I'm going to go with an internal pair of mirrored drives per previous configuration, but I also want to get an external drive that I can run off both my laptop and my Dell workstation, and update that once a week with changed data (order database, accounts, website files, plus any photo restoration stuff done in the previous week). Thereafter the contents of my main data drive tend to be fairly static. although I need to have access to a lot of material at short notice, so a drive that I can just "hook up" to the laptop should I have any problems with the main system would be ideal for my needs. Btw, Seagate are my second favourite drive-wise!

Thanks, too, to John and Prospero: very 'helpful' comments, lads...

The Framers Forum

URGENT - Source for Reasonably-Priced Disk Drives

URGENT - Source for Reasonably-Priced Disk Drives

300 gig hard drive