External Drive

We want to start keeping our backups on an External drive instead of on of our servers here at work.
I searched the previous posts, and saw some negitive, some positive with External Drives. Does anyone have a preference of a certain drive? I see that a few have said that Maxtor restored very slow. We just need a drive will work with TI and restore pretty rapidly when we need it.
I checked out all the Externals, but I would like some feed back on others who have already tried some External drives.
Thanks.

Jim

 

well my external drive isnt already assembled, rather a vantec nexstar2 coupled with a western digital 80gb ide. it works well and is seen by ATI so it should work for backup (but i dont use it for that purpose)

 

From my research when I was going to buy my external drive, the chipset used in the interface is the main factor for data transfer speed, second was firewire, third was USB2.

The recommended chipset for speed was the Oxford so I made sure that's what I ordered and I also made sure it was firewire & USB2 capable. But guess what? I ordered from a company on Ebay and received an external drive with the Prolific chipset instead. What happened is another story which I won't get into to avoid diluting this thread.

End result is that I'm satisfied with the data transfer speed using the Prolific chipset with a firewire cable. Whether it's as fast as the Oxford chipset I don't know since I don't have an external drive with that chipset. Hook up is painless as WinXP Pro sees the firewire automatically and assigns the drive to the next available drive letter. This happens on two different PCs.

Skyhawk

 

I've had very good luck with Western Digital USB 2 drives. They are not expensive, and every model I've tried has worked very well with TrueImage.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that Acronis True Image (any edition) fully supports USB (1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) devices so you can store your image archives there.

When Acronis True Image is running under Windows, it works with all the hard disk drivers detected by the operating system. If Acronis True Image is running in rescue mode, then it provides support for USB devices in the full variant, which is based on Linux operating system and uses Linux drivers for getting access to all hardware devices. The safe variant is based on DOS environment and doesn't provide you with an access to the USB, PCMCIA, SCSI, RAID devices and the network. We recommend you to use the safe variant only if the full one doesn't work.

Should you experience a problem with your USB drive or another storage device from rescue mode, please create an account, then log in and submit a request for technical support. Provide us with the exact vendor and model of the device you use and we will help you solve the issue.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

If it is any comfort to you, I have four external enclosures (the cheapest I could find at the time I bought them) in which I have used Western Digital and Maxtor drives. They all work with TI. In fact one of them is not an enclosure at all but just the cables and harness to convert an IDE device to USB2.

 

Good grief! And you think USB with TI is problematic
(yes, I know what you really mean)

 

I'm only going by the problems others run into. I also am not running the latest and greatest. The build I have works for me. I don't connect across a network, or have Raid or Sata devices. I like simple - works for me.

 

Aleksandr,

Are you saying that the "Linux rescue mode" should not work with firewire? Rescue mode works with my external drive which is using a firewire cable now, but I want verification in case I have problems in the future. I am running TI-8, build 937.

Thanks,
Skyhawk

 

Thanks to all for the replies. Going through the past treads, I didn't think that many guys(girls) were using External drives.
Are any of you keeping the drive on a Network? I'm not sure if I'm going to do that or not, its up to the organisation wether or not they want that or not. Thanks again.

Jim

 

If some of the computers have only USB 1.1, backing up to a network share will be a whole lot faster (100Mbps vs 12Mbps). You can even backup to a shared USB 2 drive on another computer that has USB 2 ports. It's not quite as fast as backing up to an internal hard drive on the network, but it's close.

Lots of us use external hard drives or network drives because the backups for so many systems won't fit on one DVD and because hard drives are faster than DVDs both backing up and restoring.

 

And even if your system has the slow usb ports, you can add a card to give you usb 2 ports - not expensive at all.

 

Hello Skyhawk,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that the Full version of rescue mode is based on Linux environment and it works with FireWire devices. The safe version is based on DOS environment which does not work with FireWire. So you use the Full version which works with your hardware without any problems.

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

Tatyana,

Thanks much for the confirmation. Very helpful for us to know that.

Skyhawk

 

It's not quite as simple as that. The "Safe" variant of the bootable rescue environment uses a combination of DOS and your motherboard's BIOS routines. A number of modern motherboards support certain USB devices at the BIOS level and therefore these can be detected after booting into TI's "Safe" variant.

So, if you can't detect your external USB hard drive after booting into the Linux based "Full" variant, try the "Safe" one - you might be pleasantly surprised .

Regards

 

Just to let all know, I install a Network Storage drive instead.
Seems to work just fine. Haven't done the restore test yet, but Acronis finds it just fine. Need to start another thread now about the Acronis Server software, "Why no hard copies"

 

I believe in the other thread you said the backups were for a banking business. It might be a good idea to keep a copy of the backup "off premises". For some reason certain people tend to go into banks when they shouldn't. And they may make a mess of things.

 

Ya, that is what I thought I was doing. I install many backups during the year, and explain to all buisnesses that they need to keep a copy off location. But this job they want it on site. And its not just a bank job, its a data center! They signed the check, and their happy..............