External hard drive question/advice needed

[ebt.]

just to throw a spanner in the works, if your 1tb external drive dies, thats a lot of pics to lose. maybe worthwhile buying two 500gb drives and either spread pics across them, or duplicate pics across them.

On the speed issue, you dont mention what OS/version of windows you're using, but the usual first steps are to run;

1. disk clean up.
2. disk defragmenter.
3. a malware check (use malware bytes and then spybot search and destroy, then ccleaner).

The unpalatable bit is if you've been running the machine for a few years, one of the best ways to speed it up is to rebuild it. no one likes doing this, so if you do start heading that way, find a local friend who can help out (best to diagnose the machine first, check page file usage etc).

Good luck

ps. for external drives people all have their pet favourite brands, wd, seagate, iomega, freecom all rate well.

 

[mountainm]

I'm just saying that before anything else he should optimize his system before adding more RAM or storage (for performance increase purposes).

Yes, do all the free stuff first, no harm in that. So we agree on both points... Good.

For a moment it was turning into an "IT crowd" episode.

 

[ADz-1983]

Yes, do all the free stuff first, no harm in that. So we agree on both points... Good.

For a moment it was turning into an "IT crowd" episode.

lol, sorry if it came across like that

 

[Trunks]

This thread has really made me chuckle.

Theres nothing like hypothesising about system problems to get us geeks riled

 

[ADz-1983]

"640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone" anyway

 

[torc]

[video=youtube;iDbyYGrswtg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg[/video]
Happy trails...torc.

 

[rik_uk3]

just to throw a spanner in the works, if your 1tb external drive dies, thats a lot of pics to lose. maybe worthwhile buying two 500gb drives and either spread pics across them, or duplicate pics across them.

On the speed issue, you dont mention what OS/version of windows you're using, but the usual first steps are to run;

1. disk clean up.
2. disk defragmenter.
3. a malware check (use malware bytes and then spybot search and destroy, then ccleaner).

The unpalatable bit is if you've been running the machine for a few years, one of the best ways to speed it up is to rebuild it. no one likes doing this, so if you do start heading that way, find a local friend who can help out (best to diagnose the machine first, check page file usage etc).

Good luck

ps. for external drives people all have their pet favourite brands, wd, seagate, iomega, freecom all rate well.

The voice of reason in that post mostly.

The OP should run disk clean up and then run disk defragmenter, if using XP these are found by click start, Accessories, system tools disk clean up. Do the same after you've run it but open disk defragmenter.

Once you've done that you want to run your anti virus (make sure its up to date)

Then run a programme to check for malware, I've been using this and its fine, download the free version and run the programme http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html

With regard external drives, if your PC is old unless you fit a USB3 card to it you won't benefit from a USB external drive but you may as well go USB 3 for when you update your PC in the future.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-external/portableusb3.0/
Take your pick, these days hard drives are more reliable than they were a decade ago. I'm not too worried about the brand, I've a real mix of makes on my home network and they all perform well.

Remember that if you move your data from your PC to an external drive you want to make DVD backups. Blank disks are about 20p each.

Run the above programmes and get back to us with how you got on.

You can pick up internal drives for pennies these days so I'd also look at fitting an extra internal drive...don't panic, its very simple to do (I'm running three internal drives these days).

 

[mousey]

I have an external hard drive quite old now [4 ish years] western digital 80gb pretty full. Personally I think WD are good but have heard alot of bad things about them. My local computer guy recommends Hatachi or Toshiba drives.

My next one will be a network hard drive, as this will enable me to reach my files through the internet wherever I am - a bit like a personal cloud [if I understand it correctly]. Seeing as my kids are getting older we have two computers [internet capable] at home and will most likely get a couple of tablet things soon-ish a centralised storage [with it's own built in backup] would seem like a good idea - perhaps not cheap if done properly.

Not really a huge fan of storage clouds as you 'lose control' of your files.

 

[bearbait]

just to throw a spanner in the works, if your 1tb external drive dies, thats a lot of pics to lose. maybe worthwhile buying two 500gb drives and either spread pics across them, or duplicate pics across them.

Yup - you could consider getting a RAID 1 USB drive. This is basically two disks inside one box. Whenever you save a file to the drive it automatically mirrors the file(s) onto the other disk inside the box, so your data is backed up automatically. Really precious stuff could be backed up to DVD as others have suggested, and perhaps kept "off site".

 

[Wayland]

Disk cleanup, Defragment, Virus/Malware check and then backup now. Then backup your backup.

I can't tell you how painful it is to lose work because of a hard drive failure. If your machine is old, so is your hard drive and they do wear out.

I lost a lot of work a few years ago because I relied on a Raid system. Unfortunately it was the raid card that failed and it corrupted both drives.

Now my machine has six internal drives, An SSD for Windows. Another SSD for the Photoshop Scratch disk. Separate HDD for Program's, Data, Raw image files and Finished image files.

These last three are backed up at least weekly onto removable HDDs on a rotation and kept in two locations. I'm shifting Terabytes of information around so optical disks are not really and option for me.

If you are intending to use multiple hard drives for backup it might be worth investing in a hard drive docking port. This allows you to buy cheaper internal drives and plug them into USB with very little fuss. Your older machine probably doesn't support USB 3 but it is backwards compatible so may be worth getting for the future.

 

[ozzy1977]

I have 2 1.5tb western digital elements external hard drives had one for 5 years now and it hasn't let me down yet, they were around £75 each

 

[Hibrion]

I'd highly recommend the Western Digital passport range. They are designed to be carried about so they can withstand a knock, whereas other externals I've seen friends using seem to be quite fragile. They are small enough to be portable but have plenty of space and are reasonably priced.

 

[ozzy1977]

I think most 1tb and under are portable, my 2 1.5tb are big buggers with external power packs.

 

[ADz-1983]

Its the smaller 2.5" external drives (laptop drives) that are portable and dont power pack as they can run from 5V USB sockets. Anything larger then the 2.5" drive and it will need power pack.

 

[rik_uk3]

Your right ADz, 3.5" need external power. Not worth bothering with 1TB drives these days as you can pick up a 3TB for a little over a £100

 

[EdS]

clean the fan out as well.

Mt old on was a bugger for running slow when it got hot.

 

[mousey]

Cheap NAS enclosure [no affilliation etc]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-Shar...1_6?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1379513271&sr=1-6

you'll have to buy your choice of disk drive to go in it though.

 

[Harvestman]

Thanks for all the advice chaps. I thought I might stir up a discussion with this one.

So, have done a system clean (main consequence so far is I've lost all my shortcuts and have to log in again to sites I use regularly, like this one), I already run a defrag on a regular-ish basis. I have AVG free 2014 installed. I don't play games, and hardly download anything. I regularly visit about a dozen websites at most. I'm running Windows 7, 2010.

I've suffered a hard-drive failure before, and lost my pictures, hence wanting to back things up. If it speeds my old machine up, so much the better. Basically, I need a new machine, but that isn't financially viable right now.

Thanks for all the input.

 

[digitracker]

You can always use cloud storage backup for your most precious pictures. There are loads out there to choose from http://www.which.co.uk/technology/s...service/the-best-free-cloud-storage-services/ and you can access them from any pc wherever you are, you also keep your originals on your harddisk and if your harddisk goes down they are in the cloud waiting for you to redownload them.

 

[ozzy1977]

I think that AVG may be having something to do with your slow speeds. I had it on my old pc running xp then after one of their updates the machine was very slow and a quick google suggested that AVG was to blame.. I removed it and installed microsofts own security essentials, which is free and the machine ran fine after that.