Choosing a back up drive.

[paul*robertson]

Hi,
I'm after a hard drive to use as a back up for my three laptops. Its for full backups which i do every few months, in case of complete hard drive failure. I'm sure its been asked a million times, is there a more reliable make of hard drive.

1. But i'll ask it again.
2. 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive.
3. Enclosure with or without a fan.
4. Any speed more reliable.
5. Just go for the one with the longest warrenty.

[killer]

I can't answer your specific questions, although (if I have understood correctly) I note that you want an external drive that can back up all three laptops. Hmmm, that could be tricky.

It might be more practical to have 3 separate external drives; one per laptop. I say this because if you need to use the external drive to be bootable then you would need three bootable partitions on the HDD, which I believe is unworkable.

Hopefully this makes sense.

[Navck]

2. Personally, 3.5"
3. Fan
4. eSATA encloser, buy your own
5. No, buy an enterprise/server harddrive, those generally use better parts even if they share the same platform. I personally am swayed toward WD because of my current experience with their latest releases and Raptor. I recommend snagging a RE3/4 when they are on sale, I grabbed a 1TB RE3 a while back and keep that in an enclosure for my main backup. I also have a small collection (3-4+?) of 320-500GB disks from Seagate, Seagate-"Maxtor" and Samsung for anything else.

[paul*robertson]

okay thanks.