Advice on portable hard drives - best thing to do in my situation

andyman1908 on 12/04/2013 - 11:09

I have a router in the living room which runs a wired connection to my smart tv (plex installed). I have a laptop with limited space (128gb ssd) and old USB2 640gb portable hard drive. I was thinking of buying a new larger (1.5tb) portable hard drive to back up important photos/videos and documents currently only contained on the portable hard drive (risky I know).

Can a portable hard drive also be shared (i.e. accessed on my smart tv and other laptops connected via wifi)?

Should I rather buy a hard drive that can connect to router (I like the idea of not having to plug in/out the hard drive into the laptop whenever I want to watch a movie on the tv)

I’m not particularly keen on buying a 3.5 inch desktop external hard drive as we only use our laptop and making it less portable sort of defeats the purpose for us.

Is there a better option I haven’t thought of? As with everything I’d like to do it on the cheap if possible :)

Computing

Comments

  • Davo1111 on 12/04/2013 - 11:29

    Can a portable hard drive also be shared (i.e. accessed on my smart tv and other laptops connected via wifi)?

    Depends, you need to share the drive on the network, which is a PITA if it's going to be unplugged often. However, many set top boxes (wd live tv etc) have a sharing feature, which allows you to mount plugged in drives as a network drive.

    Should I rather buy a hard drive that can connect to router

    yep, i'd go that route. It will always be on, but you'll get full access. On the expensive side there are NAS boxes (that range significantly in power), then you can get thing like set top boxes (as mentioned above), raspberry pi etc) - but the latter 2 are usb so dont expect speed.

    https://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/products/Technology/Da…

  • ESEMCE on 12/04/2013 - 11:44
    -2

    Much better to put stuff in the cloud in my opinion.
    50Gb free for life (deal listed today) should suffice. Or from Mega.co.nz
    Or you could go with Microsoft's Skydrive 7Gb (I think), if you want a bit more "reliability" that your data will still be there next year.

    Portable Drives aren't designed for continuous running, so you'll be lucky to get more than a couple of years from one.
    Similarly cheap NAS drives die in a few years.
    You need to spend decent money on a NAS that will power down drives when not needed and keep them sufficiently cool when the weather is hot.

    • ethereal88 on 12/04/2013 - 12:06
      +2

      Pffft, give your data to a random company to inspect, build a profile, then sell off. Yes, great idea.

      OP, connect the laptop to the network and hang a 3TB external off it. Should be viewable to all devices.

      • andyman1908 on 12/04/2013 - 12:22

        Thanks all. I only have a laptop and as we regularly use the laptop on the couch, bedroom, kitchen etc Im not keen on having any externally powered hard drives connected to it constantly.

    • tonyjzx on 12/04/2013 - 13:30
      +1

      let me inject some facts here

      i have a wdc 500 2.5 external drive

      it has clocked up 20,000hrs - that's 2yrs online constant

      i have microserver nas with 4 x 2tb drives that have been online for over 18 months… one drive has failed which i am about to RMA

      it has failed in a graceful way so i recovered everything

      the drives are over 2yrs old and have been on constantly

      so out of these 5 drives, i have one failure that i was able to fix and get warranty on

      is it this such an issue? like really? i also do not do spindown (i dont care, i'd rather now have my data ready and not wait 10-15secs to spin up)… my server is in a cool place but i dont shut it down in hot weather

      just do it

      let me put it like this… i've spent way more on car servicing and such that this and i would say this is just as useful to me…

      • _Bruce_ on 12/04/2013 - 15:51

        While I'm not convinced the cloud storage is a great solution, there are some issues with this post.

        You talk about 'facts' but then give anecdotal evidence on a total of 5 drives. Furthermore, one of these has actually failed and you suggest this is good odds?

        As I understand what you have said the reason you didn't loose data is because this drive happened to be in a NAS which detected the problem and had redundancy, which will not be the case described here.

        • tonyjzx on 12/04/2013 - 16:36

          what kind of a fantasy world do you live in that you expect zero hard drive failures?

          how do you know if i use any kind of redundancy?

          let me not try to offend you… this is my anecdote and the 'fact' here is that 5 drives of various maufactures and size formats, one has failed… the only common thread is they all have extended hours

          at what point does one person's anecdotes become relevant to you? if they dont then fine

          do i need 10 drives? 20 drives?

          bruce, in other words i question the validity of your single comment which IMO adds nothing

          i would also like to add I have 4 external 2.5 hdds with upwards of 10,000hrs each and they're all ok

          but hey, my anecdote which has factual elements means nothing to a comment about vis a vis "all portable drives arent designed for constant running"

          i do have portable drives that had stood up to constant running

        • _Bruce_ on 12/04/2013 - 16:53

          what kind of a fantasy world do you live in that you expect zero hard drive failures?

          I expect failures, which is exactly the point you were trying to argue against just before…

          how do you know if i use any kind of redundancy?

          Well you didn't explain how you fixed your RAID without data loss. Without explanation I see one of two options:

          1: You were running RAID1/5/10/6/whatever and thus didn't loose any data because you know drives fail (thus the whole point of this argument).

          2: You weren't but got lucky with SMART failure detection. In this case, it possibly wouldn't apply to a USB connected drive anyway as SMART over USB is not standardised (may or may not work depending on hardware, software).

          let me not try to offend you… this is my anecdote and the 'fact' here is that 5 drives of various maufactures and size formats, one has failed… the only common thread is they all have extended hours

          So your argument is that 20% chance of data loss is acceptable?

          at what point does one person's anecdotes become relevant to you? if they dont then fine
          do i need 10 drives? 20 drives?

          There is LOTS of readily accessible data on the failure rates of hard drives (it's much better than your examples suggest). There is no need to come in with 'facts' that add nothing but conjecture.

          bruce, in other words i question the validity of your single comment which IMO adds nothing

          The purpose was only to highlight the danger in jumping to conclusions over such poor data.

          i would also like to add I have 4 external 2.5 hdds with upwards of 10,000hrs each and they're all ok

          but hey, my anecdote which has factual elements means nothing to a comment about vis a vis "all portable drives arent designed for constant running"

          Yes, exactly.

          If you stopped and took a breath you would realise that at no point did I disagree with your conclusion, I only took exception to your arguments.

    • knk on 13/04/2013 - 12:57
      +1

      Unless they've got a fairly small amount of data or a very fast internet connection cloud isn't usually feasible.

      I'd recommend storing the more important items in the 'cloud' and having a NAS of some sort running with a local copy of the important data along with the rest.

      My personal setup uses Dropbox + a whitebox ESXi server running Debian. The Debian VM uses mdadm to create a raid1 and also pulls down all the dropbox data and then snapshots with a rather insane level of redundancy. Furthermore the important data then gets copied to a USB….just incase something with the raid goes wrong. Aside from the automation most could be accomplished off the shelf with a cheap NAS or media player like others have mentioned.

      Always however, always run an appropriate raid…and then make sure you don't trust the raid and keep a backup of the volume. Raid is not a backup solution :)

  • MITM on 12/04/2013 - 12:43

    WD Mybook Live to router. (aka Personal "cloud" storage)
    http://store.westerndigital.com/store/wdau/en_AU/pd/ThemeID.…
    But read some reviews. Some people dont like WD reliability.

  • andyman1908 on 12/04/2013 - 15:03

    I'd like to keep it as simple as possible (if possible).

    Is my thinking correct in that the common NAS are ones you put base hard drives in. I would prefer the ones that are all in one (like the WD 3TB my book live home network drive??) Should I be typing something else in to search for these type of drives?

    What sort of price am I looking at for one ~ 2tb?

    • tonyjzx on 12/04/2013 - 15:06

      i dont like netgear at all but i cant see why something like this wouldnt work:

      $135.00

      Netgear RND2000-200AJS ReadyNas Duo Diskless 2-Bay Desktop Network Attached

      add 2 x 2tb drives??? pretty cheap

  • evol on 12/04/2013 - 15:12

    Obligatory "buy a HP Microserver" post.

  • scrimshaw on 12/04/2013 - 16:02

    You can also buy a RaspBerry PI and roll your own fileserver
    http://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to-ra…

    • Davo1111 on 13/04/2013 - 14:27

      It's pretty slow though. Needs to run through usb

  • [Deactivated] on 13/04/2013 - 00:43

    Just a heads up, transfer speeds for flash drivers and hard drives plugged into the USB port of a router are terribly slow. I'd get a QNAP NAS if you can't afford an N40L at the moment. Price match this at officeworks: http://www.onlinecomputer.com.au/product_info.php?products_i…
    The raspberry pi is also a good idea but if you're not tech savvy go for the QNAP.

    • lasertip on 13/04/2013 - 14:10

      I second that. HORRIBLY, UNBEARABLY SLOW!

  • EnALup on 13/04/2013 - 12:23

    I have the same setup. TV, Blue ray and xBox connected through wire from the wireless router and Laptop and mobiles connecting wirelessly. I bought the Iomega cloud NAS 2 TB drive for around $160 ( its been approx 2 years)
    http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-storage-desktop/hom…

    It is not one of the best available NAS, but is a cheaper solution. Now all of my devices can access it as it is DLNA certified as well.
    I copy the movies from laptop to NAS and it is accessible everywhere.
    I can watch full HD movies/ 3D movies from the drive with no problems.

  • freakitude on 13/04/2013 - 13:13

    i use netgear router with readyshare capability, connected portable hdd to router. all my devices connected to router via wifi.

    its simple plug n play solution. works like a charm.

  • netsurfer on 13/04/2013 - 20:15

    The cheap options generally all have massive speed issues (i.e. very slow).

    • Router with USB 2.0 port(s): pretty much none of them support DMA so you will be lucky to get 1/3 of the USB 2.0 speed. Okay for documents, photos, music backups. Not ideal for movies.
    • WDTV Live or Raspberry Pi: the USB speed isn't fast enough either

    If you don't mind spending more. Here are some of the options:

    • Get WD Mybook Live (low end NAS)
    • Get a Router with USB 3.0 port(s)
    • HP MicroServer N40L / N54L
    • Mini-ITX based PC

    High end options:

    • QNAP NAS or other proper NAS
    • Dedicated PC to run as a file server

    You get what you paid for. Otherwise, continue to use USB portable hard drive though I recommend you get a USB 3 one this time.

    • EnALup on 14/04/2013 - 12:15

      NAS can be connected via a gigabit Ethernet cable to the router.

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