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A Rant about Hard Drive Space

Posted by Nathaniel.

Last night I was backing up my computers and I came to a realization that any hard drive smaller than 500 GB is a waste. I have a collection of cute little bus-powered 20, 30, and 60 GB portable drives that are too small to back up any of my computers. Even the 200 GB drive that I bought when I was finishing writing my thesis is now too small to back up all the pictures that I have.

Even worse, if I want to do fancy Time Machine backups using the features in MacOS X 10.5, I really need 3 times the space of the hard drive being backed up just to ensure that incremental backups are kept well into the future. For my iMac, this means that I need to get a 1 TB drive.

Luckily, those drives are for sale now and don’t actually cost any more than the 200 GB drive did 2 years ago.

  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under bitching, geek, problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “A Rant about Hard Drive Space”

  1. Qun Says:
    March 27th, 2008 at 4:52 pm Using Safari Safari 525.13 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    I’m also considering buying a new hard drive. The new MBP’s 250GB hard drive is bigger than both of the two external hard drives I have (almost as big as the two combined). So for now I’m only using Time Machine to back up one partition. I think I’ll buy a 750GB or 1TB one. But I’m still not sure whether I should go with something like My Book Studio, or buy a hard drive and an enclosure, and assemble them myself.

  2. Nathaniel Says:
    March 27th, 2008 at 7:12 pm Using OmniWeb OmniWeb on Mac OS Mac OS X

    I used to think that building drives was the best way to go, but it can be hard to get an enclosure with a good chipset and those enclosures can end up being pretty expensive on their own. Plus, you can occasionally get good deals on the prepackaged drives. I saw a MyBook Studio for about $5 more than the cheapest price I could see for a bare 1 TB drive and the Studios come with a 5 year warranty.

  3. Qun Says:
    March 27th, 2008 at 11:40 pm Using Safari Safari 525.13 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    Yes, the enclosures with 1394b are quite pricey… If I don’t need any 1394 interface it would be a better deal to just build drives.

  4. Nathaniel Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 10:36 am Using OmniWeb OmniWeb on Mac OS Mac OS X

    I think the 1394 is worth it, even if you only use 1394a. The theoretical bandwidth is less than USB, but in practice it can be twice as fast. Then when you move up to 1394b the limit just becomes how fast the drive can move data.

    With your new computer you can do something really powerful though, you could get an eSATA card to go in the ExpressCard slot. It looks like you can get one of the Griffin Technology cards for $70. That would let you transfer data like a speed demon.

    It looks like NewEgg has some external enclosures (with fans) that will let you do USB and eSATA for about $20. Now that I know that, if I had your computer, I’d probably build my own drive.

  5. Qun Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 4:32 pm Using Safari Safari 525.13 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    eSATA’s 3Gb/s is pretty amazing. But I remember reading somewhere that Time Machine (or Mac in general) doesn’t play well with eSATA, something like you can back up using eSATA but can’t recover data with it. Still need 1394. Otherwise the USB and eSATA case sounds great.

  6. Michael Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 11:52 pm Using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    I’m looking at a pretty sweet eSATA drive for work; I can’t use time machine b/c everything is encrypted, but using superduper (on a 2 TB drive) at almost 3 gigs/s would be sweet. The problem is that my current mac is old enough that I don’t think it has external eSATA. booo.

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