Hard Drive Back-Up recommendations needed

[HowardKing]

I have an S4KPro, and am planning to get a back-up hard drive. Please can someone advise a suggested drive - manufacturers to consider and any to avoid.
I assume that I need the full T-Bite size, or can a smaller drive be used? What specific drive specs are required? Any style recommendations? Thanks, Howard

[TimKennelly]

Howard,

You can use any size drive, but as it backs up whatever is on the drive you easily end up with more on the drive than the size of your external drive if it is NOT a terabyte drive.

This is not a mirror backup so if you only have 250GB of data on the drive you could actually back up to a 250/300GB drive,etc, but if you end up having 301GB of info, you could not use a drive of either of those two sizes, again, etc.

As for Mfg, I have used Hitachi, Seagate and WD without issue.

[HowardKing]

Tim, Thanks for your usual fast reply.
Looking at the WD products, for example, the Essential Edition has a 2.0 USB interface, and the Home Edition has USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and eSATA. (about $20 difference at Best Buy.)
I've never used an external drive, and don't know which interface is best for the S4000. Which interface do you recommend?
Howard
PS: Are you going to Chet's Farmington Hills session - I may be in Michigan at that time.?

[TimKennelly]

I just picked up a WD Caviar Black for $89 with free delivery from Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136284 although I see the special is over and it's now $99 delivered and a Hitachi Terabyte drive from ZipZoomFly for $67.99 after rebate ($77.99 without) plus shipping. http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... e=10009440, both work.

I use them in the Vantec NextStar Hard Drive Docking Station http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... e=10008360 which only costs $19.99 after rebate ($34.99 without rebate) plus delivery.

The actual interface you use is USB2 which the Vantec has (along with SATA).

[ShadowVision]

Gosh, I'm intrigued by the docking station. Why is this better than just daisy chaining some externals?

Also, will it hold more than one drive at a time?

I've used a number of drives with the S4KP but right now we're limited to FAT32. With HD backup, I understand that this won't be a problem, but with exporting my half hour TV show for web, I've got to stitch the clips together into one file on an NTFS or other formatted harddrive that can handle file sizes over 1 gig. Strangely, even though FAT32 is supposed to be able to accommodate file sizes up to 4 gig, our system cuts them into 1 gig sizes.

I'm hoping that the new Bogart will accept drives with more modern formatting options. But FAT32 is pretty stable from what I can tell, which is good.

[TimKennelly]

Jonathan,

I just find it way more convenient.

No, it does not allow more than one drive at at time, but it uses bare drives so it's a simple pull and switch and does not require a bunch of additional cost and space external enclosures.

I have four terabyte drives and a couple of half terabyte drives that I switch between for various backup scenarios.

These can be used for both the full drive back up process and the individual two Project back up processes.

I have one of these Vantec External Hard Drive docks that I use with one of my PCs as well.