Need some selecting between two 4TB external solutions for critical data

[js09]

Need to get four of one of the selections below. Two will be for continuous storage, the other two for backup. They will contain critical data (photography and design stuff) and will need to be accessed occasionally throughout the week.

Option 1:
External enclosure: http://www.amazon.com/Macally-3-5-Inch-Aluminum-Enclosure-G-S350SU3/dp/B00B7MVLUI/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_1
4TB internal drive: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Cache-Drive-WD40EFRX/dp/B00EHBERSE/

Option 2:
4TB Lacie all-in-one drive: http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Quadra-External-Drive-9000258U/dp/B00AK9ZT98/ref=pd_sim_e_3


Going the Lacie route, would cost be about $200 more in total. $1,000 vs $1200

My budget was ~$1000 but if the Lacie option is worth it then I'll find a way perhaps.

Thoughts? Hoping someone can persuade me in one direction as I'm on the fence now.

Ty!

 

[js09]

anyone? :|

 

[HobartTas]

Greetings

I guess I just have these comments that you might find of some use.

(a) Firewire? if you have USB3 then this is probably of no use to you unless say your using a Mac and somehow daisy chaining multiple external enclosures is of some value to you.

(b) Usually self contained externals are cheaper that those you can make yourself by buying a hard drive and an empty external box, however, if it's the same price or similar I would much prefer one you make yourself because if the electronics on the external box fails you can easily remove the drive and either then attach the bare drive to your computer (or put it into another external case) to get your own data back out.

(c) Only one backup drive for each data drive? I usually advise people to have 2 backup drives for each data drive, if its "critical data" you wouldn't be surprised at how many people who having one failing drive still manage to do something stupid to the other surviving copy like accidentally deleting it or copying the corrupt data from the failing drive onto the good data on their other drive. This would entail buying 6 drives so will increase the cost to $1500.00 however, but would be money well spent especially if the data is "critical", another advantage with the data being in 3 places is that if one of 2 copies is corrupted and doesn't match the other one then you don't know which one is bad and which one is good unless you read the file and spot the bad data, but with 3 copies you don't have to care about this because if two copies are identical and the third is different then that's the damaged one, easiest way to check this is to do file compares, if you have only 2 copies of the data you will need to use checksums beforehand to spot which is the corrupted file.

(d) Do not move the drives when in use neither move them for 10 seconds after you power them down, they don't take kindly to movement when in use, this is less of a problem with notebook sized ones as they anticipate they will be subject to some movement when in use and have accelerometers to disengage the heads when this happens especially if they sense they are in free-fall if say the laptop is accidentally dropped, desktop hard drives have no such sensors and externals can fail because of this reason.

That's my 2 cents worth, hope this helps somewhat

Cheers

 

[uOpt]

Well I support using any port that is not USB. Firewire or eSATA.

I don't like those enclosures for critical data. The PSUs in there are almost certain garbage that isn't good for 2/47. The only upside is that you have one PSU per disk, so a bad PSU can only kill one disk at a time.

They probably offer very little in the way of data integrity checking (especially when using USB) so your backup doesn't really work, corrupted data will overwrite good backups without you noticing in time. At least you should have snapshots in the backup.

 

[san112491]

I would say again it depends on what you want to do. If you want the standard of external storage I would go with the your option two as that is always going to be reliable and I have heard good things about them. On the other hand what you could do for a cost efficient price and still serve the same purpose and have it be expandable in the future is get the WD RED 4TB Harddrive. WD red comes setup with NAS and if you were to get this NAS server it offers you expandable storage as well as network storage. I would definitely look into NAS storage for small to medium size business and see what it offers.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...07064&ef_id=UmFX4gAABMoDmDS2:20131112200104:s