External HD

fmuellerfmueller Auckland, NZ Icrontian

My wife is a professor and about to move to another university, taking about 2.5TB of data with her. She asked me to buy two external 4TB HDs so she can take two identical copies and have some space to spare. Personally I am partial to Seagate, and have looked at their Backup Plus and Expansion line of HDs.

Questions:

  1. Is there any major difference between those lines that I am missing, or can I just buy what's cheaper? The specs seem pretty much identical.

  2. Should I look at brands other than Seagate? I had only good experiences with them in the past, and had a WD drive fail on me once, but that is a long time ago.

  3. Should my wife consider a different transfer modus than external HDs?

Many thanks

Frank

Comments

  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian

    Seems like a solid plan to me. Just remember though, having redundant physical backups doesn't help if you move them around physically together.

  • fmuellerfmueller Auckland, NZ Icrontian

    Yeah, that's good thinking. The drives should be separated and travel independently as soon as the copies are made.

    Amazon has the Seagate Expansion 4TB for $149 - cheaper than Newegg and Tiger. I guess I'll order two of those.

  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian

    I hope you've also looked into the legality of taking said data. Anecdotally, the university I went to (and did system admin work for as a student) had contracts with most everyone which included a clause that all data generated using university equipment was property of the university. If she doesn't have legal permission to take that data with her, she could be opening herself up to a major lawsuit.

    Beyond that, yes, Seagate drives should be fine. I would personally buy two different brands though because every now and then manufacturers have a bad run of drives and if you got two drives from the same manufacturer at the same time, they would most likely come from the same batch. If that was a batch that was faulty, you could end up losing both drives. It's highly unlikely, but it is possible.

    Also +1 to transporting them separately.

    AnnesErrorNullTurnipBlueTattoo
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