JulianSchrader.de

Hard Disk Capacity: Ready for an Upgrade?

Some days ago, my heart barely stopped working: My external hard drive with a capacity of 160GB that stores a backup of my Mac and some big files that couldn’t find a place on the 120GB internal hard drive of the MacBook Pro suddenly didn’t work anymore and made strange noises everytime I switched it on.

I hated myself for not having a copy of all my data at another place — well, the major part of the data on the probably broken disk wasn’t lost since it was a backup of my Mac’s hard drive. But there were some iMovie projects as well — and losing them would mean to lose a heavy amount of work.

Looking for a replacement I went straight ahead to a local computer store — only to find out that they price their products 150% of the amount you pay online. Dunno, I somehow didn’t think of that before.

But next to the desired 250GB hard drive I found something more interesting: A hard disk with 1TB of storage and since it’s built out of two 500GB disks it’s capable of both RAID 0 and RAID 1. The only thing that bothered me was it’s high price.

With this thingy in mind I drove back home and searched for it on Amazon. Holy crap, it was considerably cheaper there!

Today it arrived (in the early morning, thanks to the express service via DHL).

I set it up choosing RAID 1 for higher safety against data loss (there are two harddisk mirroring each other — less storage space, but higher reliability) and tried to boot my old external one more time.

It worked again and I cannot believe it — it was supposed to be broken since it didn’t work for nearly a full week and rejected every attempt of using it for days!

Well, I’m happy and have some additional and reliable storage space now — the old HD won’t get any files to carry that aren’t secured somewhere else as well. The new Terabyte Disk is supposed to hold my iPhoto Library and a backup of all the data on my Mac and my iPod — and since there are two HDs inside that mirror each other, I needn’t be too concerned about losing data that’s saved there.

All in all I could clear some space on my Macs internal drive and backup everything to the new hard disk. I’ll post a little review as soon as I worked a little more with it — for now I’d say it’s a great device that’s worth it’s price tag.