Personal data storage options

I recently purchased an ASUS N61JV-X2 notebook PC to equip myself to pursue a Masters of Science in IT Administration & Security degree program at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I subscribe to MozyHome Unlimited on a monthly basis. MozyHome Unlimited provides 2XProtect software which permits both local and remote data storage. I also purchased Symantec Norton 360 Version 4 which has its own backup and restore capabilities.

I do not have an external hard drive whereby I can make local backups of my data yet. I am looking for either an external, USB 3.0 compliant, 1 TB (or larger) 7,200 RPM hard drive or dock that is compatible with both 3.5" and 2.5" form factor drives. I also intend on purchasing Symantec Norton Ghost Version 15.0 which will give me the capability to create and maintain drive images. I do know the differences between data backups & restores versus drive imaging and I would like to have both capabilities to protect my data.

I am leaning in the direction of getting this product:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101221

If anyone here owns a Cavalry product, then please reply with your thoughts and experiences. I expect my data storage needs will continue to grow at a slow yet steady rate so it is important that I have both the USB 3.0 speed and the ability to expand my storage capacity by purchasing another hard drive and placing it into the second slot within the hard drive dock.

I would greatly appreciate replies to my thread as I am going to be making my purchasing decision by 10/01/2010.

Is Cavalry a dependable and reliable manufacturer with good technical and customer support for their products?

Should I go with an external hard drive rather than a hard drive dock to best suit my data storage needs?

Should I consider purchasing a smaller capacity portable hard drive?

Is there any other information that I should factor into my selection criteria while I am still shopping around and doing research?

Thank you.

I did ask Jude and the moderators to delete my account and my posts, but that request is still pending. I have no idea if it will be honored.

In the meantime, I am carefully considering your reply and I am concerned about the durability of a hard drive dock over time. Regardless of which product I wind up purchasing, it will be used exclusively at home atop my IKEA table. I already have an external encrypted fingerprint hard drive that has a total storage capacity of 60 GB. I put my NJIT software bundle and Microsoft Dreamspark software onto that portable hard drive because I am responsible for abiding by the software licensing rules and agreements. NJIT monitors their software bundle to ensure that faculty, staff, and students use it for academic and research purposes on either an individual usage basis or within the classroom depending upon the software application's licensing mandates.

The hard drive dock is quite flexible in that I can purchase two hard drives of any capacity in either 2.5" or 3.5" form factors to meet my data storage needs in the future. I can also store those hard drives in my bank's safe or I can purchase an inexpensive external hard drive enclosure (that utilizes two factor authentication via a user ID and password along with a fingerprint reader plus strong encryption of at least 128 bits) and put it in my FUL cross fade wheeled backpack. If I were to purchase a conventional external hard drive, then I would have to disassemble the unit and purchase another enclosure for each hard drive or a larger capacity hard drive and reassemble the unit. This is not as convenient.

Thank you for your replies thus far as I continue my research and weigh my options.

In fact, I do have one USB 3.0 port and it is manufactured by NEC. I also have an eSATA port as well. I will look into RAID options though.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Albedo 

Your notebook has no USB 3.0 capability, but it does have an eSATA port. If security is important there are some platter based solutions offering RAID 1 array (two disk -> more reliability), but all disk will fail, it's just a a matter of time.

NJIT has the Open Andrew File System available on multiple operating systems, but they only support Windows based clients. Furthermore, I would have to be a current faculty, staff, or student to have access to it through my University Computing ID (UCID) and password. Once I graduate from NJIT with my MS IT AS degree, it is my responsibility to transfer the contents of my OpenAFS directory which is mapped to the H:\ drive to another storage medium. NJIT will delete my data and my access privileges once I separate from them. The same is true for my NJIT e-mail address and its contents.

This is why I subscribe to MozyHome Unlimited. It is affordable and I can backup and restore my data to any computer that I register with them.

I am more interested in drive imaging rather than backup and restore capabilities because I can make a bit perfect copy of all my data including the operating system(s), software applications, personal data, etc. and restore them simply by inserting the disc or flash drive and executing the MS-DOS based restore process to get back up and running to my last known good configuration. Symantec Norton Ghost is a leading vendor of drive imaging technology and I prefer to stick within the same family of products.

While I may not have the largest CD collection compared to other members, I do plan on converting my entire music collection into .FLAC files very soon. Having a hard drive dock with two large capacity hard drives allows me to build and safely store my music collection while keeping one drive offline for emergencies. I plan on using Exact Audio Copy and a .FLAC Windows front end software application very soon.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by cswann1 

Well for most academic applications a 250G external would be overkill.  The only reason you'd need 2TB's is if you had to backup an enormous amount of data, such as a video library.

 

I'd just get a little 2.5" external USB drive for backups. 

 

 

 

Also, most universities have file servers that students can use to backup data to for free.  That is your safest option as any decent file server has tape backups run nightly.  So you are double protected against data loss from PC theft, HDD crashes, etc.

I will wait patiently for more replies and ideas before I actually purchase my RAM, external hard drive(s), and Norton Ghost.

Roughly speaking, I will need a minimum of 350 GB to convert and store approximately 1,000.00 CDs into .FLAC format on one hard drive. Since high fidelity audio and music are my obsessions, I will need to buy an identical second hard drive and store the same 350 GB of the same music files before I rent out a bank safe at my local PNC Bank in West Orange, NJ. This is where the external hard drive dock option is most convenient and useful in my opinion. Once I accomplish that very important task, I can purchase an inexpensive hard drive enclosure to protect the drive from physical damage while it stays locked in my bank safe. This bank safe is fire safe compliant and it can survive an earthquake up to 7.5 Richter scale according to the bank manager with whom I had the pleasure of speaking to over the telephone recently as I pondered my data storage options. I can save more money if I pay for an entire year rather than a monthly basis for access to the bank safe. They keep a copy of the master key for emergencies just in case the holder loses his or her keys and there is an option to assign a different bank safe box upon request. This bank is located three blocks away from my home.

I will certainly look for an external drive enclosure that can handle both USB 3.0 and eSATA. However, it is not yet available, but I expect that manufacturers will make these two technologies available soon. There are plenty of USB 2.0 and eSATA external drive enclosures currently on the market.

I strongly prefer Symantec Ghost as it is currently used by NJIT in their ITMS department (i.e., computer repair depot) and the Helpdesk department within the Student Mall as well. I used it before and it is proven to work correctly on repeated occasions.

This looks like an actionable plan now with your replies.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ham Sandwich 

Get an external drive that can do both USB and eSATA.  eSATA is fast.  It also has the ability to be set as a boot drive so you could put an Linux partition on your external drive and boot to Linux.  USB has the advantage of being easier to hotswap (you can also hotswap eSATA but support for that is iffy and depends on drivers and the controller).

 

Many of the drive imaging programs allow you to restore selected files so you don't have to restore the entire image.  So you can use the disk image as a form of backup.  If you need to go in and restore a specific file from the disk image you can.

 

If you have the Ultimate or Enterprise version of Windows Vista/7 you have a drive image backup utility built in.  It saves the drive image in Microsofts VHD format.  There are utilities that can mount a VHD image as an additional drive so you could mount the image and browse around to restore a specific file.  A disadvantage is that Microsoft doesn't compress the image file so it can be kind of big.  If you need to do a full restore you boot with the Windows DVD and from there you can restore the disk image.

 

There's bunches of other drive image tools available as well.  Some free some commercial. 

BootIt Next Generation looks very promising. I may look into purchasing a copy for myself later this year.

I already installed Linux Mint 9 LTS on a 50 GB slice on my D:\ drive. GRUB 2 is already installed as well. So far, I have no problems whatsoever.

There are plenty of USB 2 and eSATA hard drive enclosures on the market, but I am going to wait for a USB 3 and eSATA external enclosure which should be coming up soon. That would be an ideal solution for me.

I am sure that purchasing a hard drive dock is the right way to go for me. I am thinking that I ought to buy just the dock itself and purchase two 2 TB 7,200 RPM SATA II - 300 MB/s hard drives to save money and open up more choices.

In the meantime, I am going to download EAC and Foobar2000.

Thank you.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ham Sandwich 

The neat thing about eSATA is that you can use it to boot to Linux on an external drive.  Linux is able to be configured so it can be booted on a secondary drive and eSATA (or SATA) lets you do that.  I have a Linux partition on an external eSATA drive.  That's how I have my Linux booting setup.  Primary drive has the Windows OS.  External eSATA drive has a small Linux partition for me to play with.

 

I use BootIt NG for boot management.  Other boot managers can handle it all as well.  I started using BootIt NG several years ago and have stuck with it.  Its partition management tools are quite handy and also comes with a basic partition imaging tool that can save and restore FAT, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, Reiser, and some others.