Other External Drive - Life

[ordman]

How Long will my Files (Pic's & Video's) last on my External Hard Drive ???
Will they start to De-Grade after awhile ???

If I use the External Hard Drive Mainly for Storage, Is there a Average Lifetime for the Hard Drive ???

[90312]

They won't degrade at all, it's a different method than DVD. But they are machines and Newton's second law dictates that at some point they will fail. Then you lose them all!

[GregiBoy]

A good backup strategy is a MUST!!!

Can you imagine trying to rebuild a library from scratch again? I had to do it once and NEVER AGAIN!!

I still have external drives that are 5 years old working fine and I have had external drives trash themselves after 3 months. The 3 month ones were covered under warranty but that was nothing compared to the data that was lost.

With the cost of drives these days, it is not worth the risk to NOT back them up. Then again I am paranoid/OCD about my backups. I actually have THREE copies of everything stored. 1 x on my NAS's which is the playing/production environment, 1 x locally on my PC and another on external drives which live in another location.

I have a nifty little program called ALLWAYSYNC which I use to great effect.

[ordman]

Thanks for the Info, 90312 & Gregiboy.

Gregiboy, the External Drives that went Bad after three Months,
Do YOU think it was due to the Brand of External Drive, or it was just a Bad External Drive ???

Also,

I see these External Hard Drives sometimes on Sale, at a Decent Price,
and have bought some, I had a Seagate Hard Drive go out on me.

WD External Drive's seem to be Pretty Good.

I have some Small & Bigger External Hard Drives, have YOU noticed any Differences on how they work, and the Dependability of the Hard Drive ???

[GregiBoy]

External Drives

Gregiboy, the External Drives that went Bad after three Months,
Do YOU think it was due to the Brand of External Drive, or it was just a Bad External Drive ???

I think it was just the luck of the draw. You are always bound to get failures with electronic equipment.

I have some Small & Bigger External Hard Drives, have YOU noticed any Differences on how they work, and the Dependability of the Hard Drive ??

I've found no real difference in dependability or speed but I will always use external powered drives when I want to attach them to a playback device as I have always found the unpowered, smaller ones a hit and miss proposition. This is caused by the USB ports on the playback device not being able to supply enough power to kick the drive into action.

The program that I use is here:-

http://allwaysync.com/

It's a freebie to start off with and the free nature depends on your usage which I well exceeded and I then had no qualms about paying for it.