Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonny
Ok, so I bought a seagate freeagent external about 2 months ago and for some reason or another, it's not being recognized by my computer. The drive isn't making any noises or anything which leads me to believe that the board failed and the drive is just fine, I'll get an external enclosure and verify that later. For now, I want to purchase another hard drive or two so that if something like this happens again, I'll be prepared. I'm wondering if I should stick with seagate, or go with western digital, samsung or something else. Also, should I just buy an internal and get some enclosures and do it myself, also I was curious about putting them in a RAID configuration. I have lots of pics, videos, music that I would like to not lose, which RAID would be best suited for this, sorry for the long post.
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First I would send the seagate back to Seagate to get another one. The drive shouldn't fail that fast, also they have a 5 year warranty on their drives.
As far as brand goes, Seagate/Maxtor, Western Digital, and Samsung are all good drives. I would buy the cheapest one that you can find out of those 3 company.
As far as RAID setup, it depends on what you want to do, performance or protection. The two most commonly used RAID setup is RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 will give you the best performance but if one drives failes, you loose everything on both drive. RAID 1 setup, if one drive failes, you have a backup copy on another drive. That is as simple as I will get without going into a lot of details. I would google RAID and see which one is best for your. There are many different types of setup.
I have 3 hard drive in my computer and one external drive. I have two 80GB hard drive that I have seup in RAID 0 and this is where Windows in installed in. This is also where I install all of my programs and the drive where I work on my video and photos but I don't keep them on this drive. The other drive inside my computer is a 400GB hard drive. This is where I keep ALL of my videos, documents photos and just about everything else besides the installed program and OS. The last drive that I have is an external 500GB drive that I use to backup up my data every month or so.