trishussey
on - last edited on by
JS
- Although you might think believe the contrary right now, your hard drive isn’t big enough for all your stuff
- Your hard drive is failing
- Your hard drive will fail
Oh yeah we all think that our (insert some increment of storage) drive is big enough. I thought that when my first HD was 20 MB. Yeah that’s MB. I don’t even carry a flash drive with less than a GB of storage now. I thought my several hundred GB drive was enough when I got my new MacBook a few years ago, now I have to keep moving files off of it. The truth is that drives fill up. Pictures, music, movies, documents, apps … they take up space and no matter what you might think, it always keeps growing. At the moment I have three external drives connected to my MBP and another connected to my router. Three of the drives are 1-2TB drives and the “small drive” is 750 GB. Honestly I couldn’t do it any other way—I need the storage space.
And the backup space.
Yeah, remember those last two points above? Right. Your hard drive will fail. Period. Eventually it will go belly up and you’ll need a backup. Oh and even before that happens, you’ll have some “oops” moments (usually when this happens I don’t say “oops”, rather words that would make a sailor blush) and you’ll need to bring a file or something back from the great electronic beyond. So you need a drive just for backups. Not for “oh I’ll put some pictures and stuff on here too”, backups and only backups.
So let’s get into drives.
For a backup drive I recommend something 1 terabyte (TB) or greater that is self powered. Drives like the Western Digital My Book or LaCie drives are my top choices for backups. Yep, everyone has their favs, but for backups these are my top choices (because right now I have a La Cie 2TB as my backup which replaced at WD 1TB before it).
Generally, the choice for computer users is USB. Chances are your machine doesn’t have USB 3.0 right now and there aren’t too, too many USB 3.0 drives around anyway. If you have a new machine and it has USB 3.0 go for the faster speed. For us Mac folks, we’ve always got Firewire. Yeah, they are more expensive, but the speed is worth it. Okay until the Thunderbolt drives start showing up.
What about a drive to just have on hand? Something for extra files, maybe something that you can tote around with you? While for my desktop I have a bunch of self-powered drives for files that I generally only need at home, I do keep a 500GB Western Digital Passport (a dual USB/Firewire model) on hand in case I need to tote big files around with me and as extra storage.
So, what does a student need for back to school?
At home at least a 1TB for backup then I’d suggest a 350-500GB drive that you can carry around with you for more files. Can you have too many drives? Well yes and no. No in that you’ll always find stuff to put on them, yes in that you might not be able to find the things you put on them if you have too many!
