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thewayneMy current iMac has a 3 TB drive, and I have two 3 TB drives that I back up to. Unfortunately, as my iMac has only about 500 gig or so free, that means my Time Machine backups don't go back as far as I'd like. I'm two weeks away from my first weekly paycheck coming in, and I'm planning on buying a 6 TB bare drive and a second in January, then relegating the 3 TBs to laptop backup duties.
Sadly, since getting back from our Thanksgiving trip, I keep getting 'Drive was not ejected properly' errors. My computer and the drives are plugged in to a UPS, and since my computer is not crashing, that means there's a problem in the drive, the interface electronics, or its power supply.
*sigh*
Since it's the start of the month, I'll send this drive to the observatory with my wife tonight to swap with its companion, and we'll see if the problem continues. That'll tell me if it's the power supply, which is unlikely. Wallwart failure is pretty rare.
My laptop backups were a pair of 1 TB drives back when our two laptops both sported 500 gig drives. Now my wife's laptop has a 1 TB SSD, and I'm planning on upgrading mine to the same. The current drives just can't cope, so they're only getting backed up to a single 5 TB drive that lives in a fire-proof lockbox here in the house. As a bit of a paranoid former network administrator, nothing is backed up properly until there's a copy off-site, thus, copies go to the observatory, 20 miles away.
Curiously, the failing 3 TB is the newer of the 3 TB pair! Western Digital made a cosmetic change to the case, so it's easy to tell the difference. I find it failing before its partner to be kind of odd. It's been my experience to expect one of these four drives to fail every year, but come to think of it, it's been a couple of years since I replaced one. And now the newest drive is failing!
The replacement will be a Hitachi data center-rated bare drive, it'll live in one of those drop-in docking cradles. Both my iMac and my wife's laptop support USB 3, as does the cradle, so those laptops will be blazing fast. My laptop? Well, it's a 2011 model, so not so fast. And when I get the second 6 TB drive, I can migrate my Movies directory to it and free up some 800 gig from my iMac!
The ultimate solution will be to get a small NAS box that I can RAID and back up (and that's a tech that I'm not really familiar with), but that's only going to be if I can find something good really cheap, and if the job persists longer than I think it might.
Sadly, since getting back from our Thanksgiving trip, I keep getting 'Drive was not ejected properly' errors. My computer and the drives are plugged in to a UPS, and since my computer is not crashing, that means there's a problem in the drive, the interface electronics, or its power supply.
*sigh*
Since it's the start of the month, I'll send this drive to the observatory with my wife tonight to swap with its companion, and we'll see if the problem continues. That'll tell me if it's the power supply, which is unlikely. Wallwart failure is pretty rare.
My laptop backups were a pair of 1 TB drives back when our two laptops both sported 500 gig drives. Now my wife's laptop has a 1 TB SSD, and I'm planning on upgrading mine to the same. The current drives just can't cope, so they're only getting backed up to a single 5 TB drive that lives in a fire-proof lockbox here in the house. As a bit of a paranoid former network administrator, nothing is backed up properly until there's a copy off-site, thus, copies go to the observatory, 20 miles away.
Curiously, the failing 3 TB is the newer of the 3 TB pair! Western Digital made a cosmetic change to the case, so it's easy to tell the difference. I find it failing before its partner to be kind of odd. It's been my experience to expect one of these four drives to fail every year, but come to think of it, it's been a couple of years since I replaced one. And now the newest drive is failing!
The replacement will be a Hitachi data center-rated bare drive, it'll live in one of those drop-in docking cradles. Both my iMac and my wife's laptop support USB 3, as does the cradle, so those laptops will be blazing fast. My laptop? Well, it's a 2011 model, so not so fast. And when I get the second 6 TB drive, I can migrate my Movies directory to it and free up some 800 gig from my iMac!
The ultimate solution will be to get a small NAS box that I can RAID and back up (and that's a tech that I'm not really familiar with), but that's only going to be if I can find something good really cheap, and if the job persists longer than I think it might.
