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Big Hard Drive? Why Compensate?

August 23rd, 2007 · 3 Comments · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I’ve been thinking about adding a new hard drive to my system. Mainly due to the fact that lately I’ve been recording a lot of TV shows using Sage TV’s recording software. At Good encoding, we’re talking roughly 1.7gb per hour – so on a 250gb drive that equates to roughly 135 hours of TV. Not too shabby, especially since I’ll be deleting many shows once they come to DVD.

So why 250gb? Why not 500 or 750? At ~$200, a 750gb drive isn’t seriously breaking the bank. Well the simple matter of fact is that hard drives fail. Whether it’s a manufacturer defect, bad maintenance (dust, hot case), or just plain old age (although some can last a looong time, they should really be replaced every 2-3 years), at some point your hard drive will fail.

So what do you want to do? Replace 250gb or 750gb? And don’t even get me started on the new terabyte drives. It’s also easier to back up a smaller hard drive. Heck, I might even just get another 150gb or few – I have two internal drive bays left and an external SATA port. Losing 150gb vs. a terabyte of data thanks to a drive failure sounds way better to me.

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3 Comments so far ↓

  • I feel secure

    […] can be pretty scary. Don’t be stupid and think it can never happen to you. Never forget that hard drives fail. This is a fact. Whether or not you lose everything when they do is up to […]

  • Ryan Wiancko

    Being a person that did loose 1 TB a couple years back I couldn't agree with you more. However in hindsight the trauma of the event is what caused me to switch from windows to linux(I'm still using the Hd that failed, just a nice format to EXT3 and it's working like a charm) so I am glad it happened but shit the amount of data I lost. An entire life of accumulated photos, music, all the fixens. I still have that big drive but every piece of important data is mirrored around to my other drive every week. I've had so many drives fail in my life time that I am not trusting a single one to anything important anymore. And with the new 1.5 TB drives at new egg for 97 bux why not buy 2 and just have them back each other up every night?

  • Ryan Wiancko

    Being a person that did loose 1 TB a couple years back I couldn't agree with you more. However in hindsight the trauma of the event is what caused me to switch from windows to linux(I'm still using the Hd that failed, just a nice format to EXT3 and it's working like a charm) so I am glad it happened but shit the amount of data I lost. An entire life of accumulated photos, music, all the fixens. I still have that big drive but every piece of important data is mirrored around to my other drive every week. I've had so many drives fail in my life time that I am not trusting a single one to anything important anymore. And with the new 1.5 TB drives at new egg for 97 bux why not buy 2 and just have them back each other up every night?

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