You should look into "replication" first. I keep all my devices sync'd up on the "NAS" (AKA virtual machine backup server) using sftp. And then the backup server handles backing up there to another device.Originally Posted by ka8ncr
After the initial sync, it's all just "play catch up" over one day. It just syncs deltas.
Just bought a pair of WD Elements drive, and son of a gun, the same affliction affects them also - you cannot access more than ONE WD drive at a time. Going back to Best buy...
Think it's time to buy bare drives and USB to SATA enclosures.
that's what i do. i like enclosures from other world computing, but they're a bit spendy. i also have to find a 2.5" SATA disk for my mac mini ... may be getting a hybrid for this disk since i can get it cheap.
"... and another thing about you democrats ... you all believe in science!" -- denny crane
Which drive enclosures that allow more than one on a system would you recommend... be nice if it was available from newegg.com
The combined price between bare drive and enclosure would not be that much more than from Best Buy..
i'm afraid i don't get your question here. do you mean an enclosure that can house several disks for one host? i have one of those from newegg ... has room for two more disks.
"... and another thing about you democrats ... you all believe in science!" -- denny crane
I've got a whole slew (8-10) of the "Galaxy Metal Gear Box" USB drive enclosures -- never had a problem with any of them and they were pretty inexpensive, but it looks like they're no longer made...?
A clue for shopping on Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCateg...s&Order=RATING
Sort by rating... 5 eggs and 300+ ratings? You're probably going to be okay.
ETA: I've never heard of an external USB drive where only one was allowed on a system at a time. That sounds more like a problem with the system than the drive, but who knows? USB operates under Plug and Play rules and two identical devices will present identical vendor and product ID's to the system -- it's up to the system to keep them separate. I think...
Last edited by kf0rt; 11-26-2010 at 07:41 AM.
With the Western Digital drives, connect an external USB drive, and you see the drive letter assigned to that drive. Plug in a second WD external USB drive, and no drive letter is assigned to it, even though if you look at it through 'Manage', the drive is there, but no drive letters.
With Seagate drives, plug in an external drive, you get the drive letter assigned. Plug in a second drive, the next available drive letter is assigned. What spooked me about Seagate, is the clicking from some of the drives, and the failure to work when plugged in. I would have to cycle the power like three times before the drive connected. Western Digital didn't have these problems, they just had other problems.
So, I am looking for external drive enclosures that do not behave like the WD external USB drives. This way, I can use better drives without the problems, and to be able to use more than one external USB drive on the system.
If this problem exists ONLY with Western Digital and not with Seagate or Maxtor, I know because I have these drives, then it isn't the system.
ah. that behavior is unique to wd (it annoyed me last week--one of our collaborators sent a disk to be filled up with data and it was a wd external. so: plug it in: one is a read-only thing that gets assigned a drive letter, and the lion's share of the disk space is visible but not assigned a letter or a mount point. formatted it and gave it a drive letter, then off we go.) the wd i carry around in my day bag doesn't do this, but probably because it's been formatted several times into several different fs types ...
"... and another thing about you democrats ... you all believe in science!" -- denny crane
I've been running WD drives exclusively for eons in external enclosures (but not purchased that way) and never had a problem. I also format new drives before using them, even if it's just the "quick format."
Bizarre, and odd that I couldn't find anything on the net about this other than some instances that were pretty vague - "Plugged it in and the computer wouldn't see it" stuff. If it shows up in Windows' Disk Manager, delete volume, create volume, create partition, mark partition active, format, done (or something like that). I imagine Paul tried that, tho...
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