2TB drives?

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 22:21:31 -0400, Jason wrote:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:31:01 -0500 "Jo-Anne" wrote
in article

I want to buy a couple external hard drives for backing up my new
Windows 7 computer. My old external drives are 160GB and 320GB Western
Digital My Passport Essentials, and they've worked well.

I was planning to get 1TB drives of this brand, but there are now 2TB
drives that aren't much pricier. Are the 2TB drives generally as
reliable as the 1TB? And is WD still considered a good brand?

I have three WD 2TB drives, one internal and two USB(3) external, and
they have been just fine. I gave up on Seagate years ago. Don't be
tempted to go to 3TB; Win 7 doesn't handle them with some hoop-jumping.

I believe it was the original version of XP that had the 2.2TB limitation,
wasn't it? I see to remember a Service Pack that addressed that limitation.

At any rate, I have a mix of 2TB, 4TB, and 6TB drives in my Win 7 systems
and didn't have to do anything special to make them work.

--

Char Jackson

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 21:42:34 -0400, Big_Al wrote:

Ken Blake wrote on 4/13/2015 9:33 PM:

But as far as I'm concerned, you should decide whether to do it or not
based solely on price. See which is cheaper, an external drive or the
combination of drive and enclosure.

Price may not be the sole issue. As has been pointed out earlier, if either the drive or enclosure die, you only need
to buy one.


Yes, a good point.

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 21:15:02 -0500, Jo-Anne
wrote:

On 4/13/2015 8:33 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 19:09:50 -0500, Jo-Anne
wrote:

Thank you! I don't think I'm up to building my own, however.


Bear in mind that it's extremely easy. The word "building" is an
overstatement. You simply insert the drive in the enclosure, plug it
in, and screw the enclosure back together. You need no tool but a
screwdriver, and it takes less than five minutes even for those people
who are all thumbs.


But as far as I'm concerned, you should decide whether to do it or not
based solely on price. See which is cheaper, an external drive or the
combination of drive and enclosure.


Thank you again, Ken. I'm going to be away from the computer for a
couple weeks, so I'll hold off buying the 2TB drive(s). Maybe when I
return, I'll be brave enough to try what you said.


You're welcome. Glad to help.

In article ,
lid says...

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 22:21:31 -0400, Jason wrote:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:31:01 -0500 "Jo-Anne" wrote
in article

I want to buy a couple external hard drives for backing up my new
Windows 7 computer. My old external drives are 160GB and 320GB Western
Digital My Passport Essentials, and they've worked well.

I was planning to get 1TB drives of this brand, but there are now 2TB
drives that aren't much pricier. Are the 2TB drives generally as
reliable as the 1TB? And is WD still considered a good brand?

I have three WD 2TB drives, one internal and two USB(3) external, and
they have been just fine. I gave up on Seagate years ago. Don't be
tempted to go to 3TB; Win 7 doesn't handle them with some hoop-jumping.

I believe it was the original version of XP that had the 2.2TB limitation,
wasn't it? I see to remember a Service Pack that addressed that limitation.

At any rate, I have a mix of 2TB, 4TB, and 6TB drives in my Win 7 systems
and didn't have to do anything special to make them work.

The limit was/is imposed by the math, e.g. cylinder count got to much.
Don't think the OS really had much to do with it.

pjp wrote:
In article ,
lid says...

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 19:09:50 -0500, Jo-Anne
wrote:

On 4/13/2015 2:43 PM, Thats Me wrote:
On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:31:01 -0500, Jo-Anne
wrote:

I want to buy a couple external hard drives for backing up my new
Windows 7 computer. My old external drives are 160GB and 320GB Western
Digital My Passport Essentials, and they've worked well.

I was planning to get 1TB drives of this brand, but there are now 2TB
drives that aren't much pricier. Are the 2TB drives generally as
reliable as the 1TB? And is WD still considered a good brand?

Why buy a box with crap (software) you don't want? Build your own.

Rosewill RX-358 V2 BLK - Black, 3.5" SATA to USB & eSATA External
Enclosure with Internal 80 mm Fan
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817173042
Around $15 US

Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA
6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236404
Around $80 US

I use 4 of these (1 on each Desktop computer as an external esata
Drive, 2 on my Synology NAS connected via USB). The NAS Drives are
used to back up the NAS Drives. These have worked well for the last
18 months.

Just my Nickles worth, YMMV.
Have a nice day.

Remove NOPANTS To reply by direct E-Mail;
Support: The Right to Privacy and Anti-SPAM projects.


Thank you! I don't think I'm up to building my own, however.


Bear in mind that it's extremely easy. The word "building" is an
overstatement. You simply insert the drive in the enclosure, plug it
in, and screw the enclosure back together. You need no tool but a
screwdriver, and it takes less than five minutes even for those people
who are all thumbs.



I have one of those that supports both IDE and SATA drives. One screw
and it slides out, take one little thin tin plate off, four screws hold
drive in, reverse order to swap another drive in it. Do it all the time
as I have many older 100Gb drives laying around here that I put some
backup of something on it and then put it on a shelf somewhere labelled
accordingly. I also have a WD external then when it went belly up after
warrenty it also turned out to be nothing more than a SATA enclosure and
it's just as easy to swap drives in it also. There's also my little
2/5" SATA enclosure came with my SSD is very handy for various laptop
drives I have.

I do not like Seagte externals in regard to they make it damn near
impossible to take case apart without breaking some little plastic
catches. Done on purpose I suspect for warranty reasons but still ...


I have a DYNAMODE 2.5" and 3.5" SATA USB 3.0 Docking Station
http://tinyurl.com/jwop9yw
which I bought a couple of years ago.
I bought a 2TB internal hard drive as well. I thought it might be a good
idea to clone my desktop hard drive to it, and have it available in case
the thing ever failed so catastrophically that I couldn't boot into it
at all and restore from an image backup.

I think I did the cloning two months in succession (in addition to the
usual imaging backup to another external hd), at which point I came to
the decision that my paranoia had gone too far. So now it sits gathering
dust together with the hd.

The docking station could have its uses, though, with someone who had a
big collection of hds.

Ed

On Tue, 14 Apr 2015 12:47:37 -0300, pjp
wrote:

In article ,
says...

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 22:21:31 -0400, Jason wrote:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:31:01 -0500 "Jo-Anne" wrote
in article

I want to buy a couple external hard drives for backing up my new
Windows 7 computer. My old external drives are 160GB and 320GB Western
Digital My Passport Essentials, and they've worked well.

I was planning to get 1TB drives of this brand, but there are now 2TB
drives that aren't much pricier. Are the 2TB drives generally as
reliable as the 1TB? And is WD still considered a good brand?

I have three WD 2TB drives, one internal and two USB(3) external, and
they have been just fine. I gave up on Seagate years ago. Don't be
tempted to go to 3TB; Win 7 doesn't handle them with some hoop-jumping.

I believe it was the original version of XP that had the 2.2TB limitation,
wasn't it? I see to remember a Service Pack that addressed that limitation.

At any rate, I have a mix of 2TB, 4TB, and 6TB drives in my Win 7 systems
and didn't have to do anything special to make them work.

The limit was/is imposed by the math, e.g. cylinder count got to much.
Don't think the OS really had much to do with it.

Oops, I was thinking of the 137GB limit imposed by pre-SP1 XP.

For the 2.2TB limit, that's an MBR limitation. MBR only has 32 bits
available to represent the number of logical sectors. MBR's successor, GPT,
uses 64 bits to represent the number of logical sectors. So the next
question becomes, which Windows OS versions support GPT (and it's a separate
question for data disks versus boot disks, with the latter requiring UEFI
rather than the older traditional BIOS).

From https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2581408

For a system to be able to address the maximum capacity of a device that has
a storage capacity of more than 2 TB, the following prerequisites apply:

The disk must be initialized by using GPT.
The Windows version must be one of the following (32-bit or 64-bit,
unless otherwise noted, but including all SKU editions):
Windows Server 2008 R2 (only 64 bit version available)
Windows Server 2008
Windows 7
Windows Vista


My conclusion: the OS is a contributing factor because it must support GPT.

This also explains why I had no difficulty adding 4TB and 6TB drives to my
Win 7 systems. Win 7 natively supports GPT without any hoop-jumping.

--

Char Jackson

On 4/13/15 10:09 AM, Stormin' Norman wrote:
On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 09:01:22 -0600, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 4/12/15 8:21 PM, Jason wrote:
On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:31:01 -0500 "Jo-Anne" wrote
in article

I want to buy a couple external hard drives for backing up my new
Windows 7 computer. My old external drives are 160GB and 320GB Western
Digital My Passport Essentials, and they've worked well.

I was planning to get 1TB drives of this brand, but there are now 2TB
drives that aren't much pricier. Are the 2TB drives generally as
reliable as the 1TB? And is WD still considered a good brand?

I have three WD 2TB drives, one internal and two USB(3) external, and
they have been just fine. I gave up on Seagate years ago. Don't be
tempted to go to 3TB; Win 7 doesn't handle them with some hoop-jumping.

My brother-in-law has had no problems with his 3 TB drives with one
exception...

There is a but in MS's Backup and Restore (not System Restore) program.
It will fail to create a system image on anything over 2TB in size.

How has he partitioned the drives, MBR? I suspect this problem would be
eliminated by partitioning the drives using GPT.

Our experimenting and discovering about the bug (although I typed "but"
LOL) was when 3TB drives were new to the market. IIRC, there's an MS
article about this.

Exactly what I did, as I was the one trying to solve the issue, has been
lost to the mists of time. I know I tried partitioning, but I don't
remember if I used GPT or not. I don't remember which formatting was
original either.

They also have their son do fixes on their computers, and his approach
to doings is much different than mine. Son makes it very techie which
they don't understand, and I believe in the KISS principle (Keep It
Simple, Stupid) so the approaches were working against each other. I
gave up, and rarely if ever try to fix issues with their systems these days.

Although I broke down on this position the last time I visited. Cut
1:45 min. off the boot time.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...=vs.85%29.aspx

Going to bookmark this.



--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 36.0.4
Thunderbird 31.5
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 4/13/15 12:38 PM, Gene Bloch wrote:


On 4/13/2015 8:01, Ken Springer wrote:
On 4/12/15 8:21 PM, Jason wrote:
On Sun, 12 Apr 2015 18:31:01 -0500 "Jo-Anne" wrote
in article

I want to buy a couple external hard drives for backing up my new
Windows 7 computer. My old external drives are 160GB and 320GB Western
Digital My Passport Essentials, and they've worked well.

I was planning to get 1TB drives of this brand, but there are now 2TB
drives that aren't much pricier. Are the 2TB drives generally as
reliable as the 1TB? And is WD still considered a good brand?

I have three WD 2TB drives, one internal and two USB(3) external, and
they have been just fine. I gave up on Seagate years ago. Don't be
tempted to go to 3TB; Win 7 doesn't handle them with some hoop-jumping.

My brother-in-law has had no problems with his 3 TB drives with one
exception...

There is a but in MS's Backup and Restore (not System Restore) program.
It will fail to create a system image on anything over 2TB in size.

How about other SW? For example, Macrium, Acronis, and EaseUS, some of
which are free or have free versions.

I don't know, Gene. AFAIK, no one has tried anything.

He keeps talking about doing "something", but never gets there. So
basically he just buys another drive, then copies everything. And he
has so many duplicates, triplicates, and more he could probably regain
50% of his used space just by getting rid of all the copies.


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 36.0.4
Thunderbird 31.5
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 4/14/2015 11:43, Ken Springer wrote:
How about other SW? For example, Macrium, Acronis, and EaseUS, some of
which are free or have free versions.

I don't know, Gene. AFAIK, no one has tried anything.

He keeps talking about doing "something", but never gets there. So
basically he just buys another drive, then copies everything. And he
has so many duplicates, triplicates, and more he could probably regain
50% of his used space just by getting rid of all the copies.


OK, I can see it's not so easy to deal with :-(

I also just read your post about the son and how helpful he is (which I
think I recall you've mentioned in the past).

In your situation I would definitely abdicate my tech-support position
with that family, as I have with others in the past.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:14:37 +0100 "Ed Cryer"
wrote in article
I'd like to put in a recommendation for "portable" 2TB drives; USB power
is sufficient, which makes them like a large memory stick. I can easily
put two in a pocket. They come in different colours too.


I believe the 2.5" portables are 5400 rpm drives. I'm not sure about the
larger ones.

On 4/14/15 6:04 PM, Gene Bloch wrote:


On 4/14/2015 11:43, Ken Springer wrote:
How about other SW? For example, Macrium, Acronis, and EaseUS, some of
which are free or have free versions.

I don't know, Gene. AFAIK, no one has tried anything.

He keeps talking about doing "something", but never gets there. So
basically he just buys another drive, then copies everything. And he
has so many duplicates, triplicates, and more he could probably regain
50% of his used space just by getting rid of all the copies.


OK, I can see it's not so easy to deal with :-(

I also just read your post about the son and how helpful he is (which I
think I recall you've mentioned in the past).

I don't want any reader to think there is anything wrong technically
with what my nephew does to his parents' computers. But whatever you do
to a computer, it should not be above the users knowledge level.
Otherwise they ignore it, so any good you may have done will likely be
undone.

In your situation I would definitely abdicate my tech-support position
with that family, as I have with others in the past.



--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 36.0.4
Thunderbird 31.5
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

In article ,
says...

On 4/14/15 6:04 PM, Gene Bloch wrote:


On 4/14/2015 11:43, Ken Springer wrote:
How about other SW? For example, Macrium, Acronis, and EaseUS, some of
which are free or have free versions.

I don't know, Gene. AFAIK, no one has tried anything.

He keeps talking about doing "something", but never gets there. So
basically he just buys another drive, then copies everything. And he
has so many duplicates, triplicates, and more he could probably regain
50% of his used space just by getting rid of all the copies.


OK, I can see it's not so easy to deal with :-(

I also just read your post about the son and how helpful he is (which I
think I recall you've mentioned in the past).

I don't want any reader to think there is anything wrong technically
with what my nephew does to his parents' computers. But whatever you do
to a computer, it should not be above the users knowledge level.
Otherwise they ignore it, so any good you may have done will likely be
undone.

In your situation I would definitely abdicate my tech-support position
with that family, as I have with others in the past.


About the only peice of advice I try to hammer into people who's pc I
fix is "NOTHING IS FREE ... Do not press that button or let it do
anything to your pc!!!" And yet, there's that little advertised free
game or free scan or free ... and they can't seem to stop themselves.

Gene Bloch wrote:


On 4/14/2015 11:43, Ken Springer wrote:
How about other SW? For example, Macrium, Acronis, and EaseUS, some of
which are free or have free versions.

I don't know, Gene. AFAIK, no one has tried anything.

He keeps talking about doing "something", but never gets there. So
basically he just buys another drive, then copies everything. And he
has so many duplicates, triplicates, and more he could probably regain
50% of his used space just by getting rid of all the copies.


OK, I can see it's not so easy to deal with :-(

I also just read your post about the son and how helpful he is (which I
think I recall you've mentioned in the past).

In your situation I would definitely abdicate my tech-support position
with that family, as I have with others in the past.


I tell everyone who asks me - $250 per hour, 2 hour minimum. If they
say yes, I suggest they use the expenditure to buy a new pc. It's been
quite some time since someone asked me to help.



--
....winston
msft mvp consumer apps