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Largest external hard drives available?


stargazer9999

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You can get a Seagate 8TB external USB 3.0 hard drive from Lazada for about 8,500 baht.

 

See here.

 

WD also make a 6TB external USB 3.0 hard drive which you can get from Lazada for about 8,300 baht.

 

See here.

Edited by Jai Dee
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19 minutes ago, FolkGuitar said:

Amazon was selling the 8TB Seagate for $149. Even with shipping, it comes out cheaper than Lazada.

 

Which is weird, given that so many are made in Thailand...

 

Caveat, though.  There are several quality/ reliability levels when it comes to HD's so the price of a Seagate or a WD "8Tb" drive may be all over the map, depending on whether you get a cheap consumer grade HD or an industrial server farm grade HD.  They generally don't use the good ones in a plain Jane  external enclosure where nobody sees what's inside...

 

On an aside, I bought several 2Tb external drives in BKK during the flooding of 2011 and every one of them cratered within a year.  I suspect their better units were being sent international to meet demand during the floods when a lot of mfg capacity was shut down, and the dregs got stuck in external enclosures for the domestic market.  But I'm naturally suspicious.  It did cause me to change vendors to WD (after a lot of web research on which drives last longer- hint, hint).

 

Edited by impulse
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1 hour ago, steven2018 said:

You could set up a NAS and have lots of storage available.

Posted from Android using Tapatalk
 

 

Thank you for that interesting information about NAS.

 

I had never heard of it before and when I Googled it, most of the hits for NAS were of an American rapper.

 

It looks very interesting and a better alternative to Cloud storage.

 

 

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34 minutes ago, impulse said:

 

Which is weird, given that so many are made in Thailand...

 

Caveat, though.  There are several quality/ reliability levels when it comes to HD's so the price of a Seagate or a WD "8Tb" drive may be all over the map, depending on whether you get a cheap consumer grade HD or an industrial server farm grade HD.  They generally don't use the good ones in a plain Jane  external enclosure where nobody sees what's inside...

 

On an aside, I bought several 2Tb external drives in BKK during the flooding of 2011 and every one of them cratered within a year.  I suspect their better units were being sent international to meet demand during the floods when a lot of mfg capacity was shut down, and the dregs got stuck in external enclosures for the domestic market.  But I'm naturally suspicious.  It did cause me to change vendors to WD (after a lot of web research on which drives last longer- hint, hint).

 

You can buy HDD's in San Francisco, USA (which are manufactured in Lopburi, Thailand) cheaper than anywhere in Thailand. 100%.

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1 hour ago, impulse said:

There are several quality/ reliability levels when it comes to HD's

 

I'd like to add to this wise caveat: if a very large hd fails, unrecoverably, you get a lot more headache than if one of two, or more, fail.

 

imho, the right combination these days is:

 

1. back-up key files and data to two separate cloud servers

 

2. have a single external hard drive used only to back-up a complete disk image of primary boot drive. dis-connect this drive when not in use.

 

3. prepare a bootable OS flash-drive that includes the software that can restore a disk from the image backed-up in #2.

 

cheers, ~o:37;

 

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I agree with orang37's backup procedure but I backup to two external hard drives.  They are so inexpensive these days and it's worth the peace of mind to have another bootable OS/data source available.  You can have a PC completely die, buy a new one, and restore OS/data and be up an running in a few hours.  Love it!

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Personally I am not too happy with Seagate as the 2T hard drive on my desktop pc died about a year ago and despite several valiant efforts from guys here on TVF, a place down in Phuket it refuses to return to life.

 

Seagate have said for between 15 and 20,000 thb they give it a try but I have to send it to Singapore or Holland and there is no guarantee that they can salvage it.

 

Of course I stupidly didn't bother to back it up at the time, but since then I religously back it up to a WD 2T external hard drive every Friday morning now, having shut the stable door and losing the horse.

 

I think that Orang37 has the right idea though I am not too sure about cloud drive.

Edited by billd766
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I invested a little more money in a 4Tb Tunderbolt 3 G-Technology drive as the G-Techs are much more reliable than the run o the mill brands, although they are made by WD but with better components 

Hard to find in Thailand, Invade list them on their website but never seem to be available so I got my from Amazon & had to suck up the shipping and tax on top.

 

If you want a drive larger than 3tb to store your complete digital life on it, I would invest in a more reliable brand/model.

All mechanical drives will fail eventually & you don’t know when.

SSDs are still too expensive for the larger Ext Tb, but that is the way to go if your feeling flush.

 

 

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12 minutes ago, twizzian said:

SSDs are still too expensive for the larger Ext Tb, but that is the way to go if your feeling flush.

My good friend, who is Storage Manager at a large ISP-teleoperator and cloud service, told me that in their experience with SSDs, they fail at same rate at high quality normal Disc-Drives, but SSDs are (much) faster in operation.

 

Of my own four SSDs (in Thailand) one has already failed – glad I remember to regular take a back-up...:whistling:

 

Cloud drives, by the way, work in RAID, so all date are double-stored...:smile:

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I understand that HD makers make a large batch of HDD's at a time and then they test them.

The not so good ones are marked up as their cheapest brand and the really good ones as their most expensive brand.

Some makers have a range of different quality brands in between.

You will therefore, largely, get what you pay for.

However, with the modern mantra of planned obsolescence, everything will always fail at some point.

Multiple copies on different devices has always been my strategy.

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I have been using drobo for a few years now and it is awesome. Backs itself up automatically and when a HDD fails it lets you know and you go get a replacement. My ex still uses an older version which is at least 8 years old and I have the 5D. Up to two hdd’s Can fail before losing any data - a very rare occurrence. 

 

Currently I have a An old Mac Pro with HDD’s in raid for the home folder built into the main computer and use drobo as storage of movies, tv shows etc (currently 16TB) When the new Mac Pro comes out (hopefully next year), I will be making my drobo the home folder and run everything through it.

 

http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/

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you can also store your data on a M disc. THere are 4.7GB DVD-R to 25GB, 50GB BD-Rand 100GB BD-XL. 

LG for instance is selling mdiscs burners. The disc should last a 1000 years ! OK it is not tb, but ... looks safe if you want to keep data for long time 

NAS is also nice ofcourse as you put several hd's in the NAS , so you can spread your data over several hd's.

Never the less if a hd is failing, you probably loose your data. Sometimes they can revive the data, but it will cost you.

So must be really worthwhile to revive. Storing on a mdisc should be more worthwhile then

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On 12/27/2017 at 1:05 PM, orang37 said:

I'd like to add to this wise caveat: if a very large hd fails, unrecoverably, you get a lot more headache than if one of two, or more, fail.

For those interested - Big C (old Carrefour) - today - 2300 baht

 

2TB HDD.jpg

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On 12/27/2017 at 11:18 AM, Jai Dee said:

You can get a Seagate 8TB external USB 3.0 hard drive from Lazada for about 8,500 baht.

 

See here.

 

WD also make a 6TB external USB 3.0 hard drive which you can get from Lazada for about 8,300 baht.

 

See here.

Seagate products are unacceptable to me. Cheaply made Chinese junk guaranteed to break after the warranty. That was my experience at least. 

I prefer Western Digital products. Made in Thailand. I have been using my WD SATA internal HDD's for close to 10 years it seems. No problems, I have been using WD Passports for over 5 years. I also use an oooolddd Iomega 500gb USB/firewire external device for a long time the USB connection no longer works but firewire (I think the proper terminology is IEEE 1394 as firewire was Apple technology) does. Good luck finding a pc/mac with this technology. I was searching for the manufacturing location of seagate and search results had the same "Seagate corp headquarters are in Dublin Ireland, with operational HQ in Cupertino, CA. (Typical US corporate tax dodgers, want the USA name without paying the price).  I read on Toms Hardware that Seagate drives are made in Communist China and Thailand. The Chinese made drives have a bad reputation where the Thai made fare better. 

 

Edited by Grumpy Duck
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17 hours ago, twizzian said:

I invested a little more money in a 4Tb Tunderbolt 3 G-Technology drive as the G-Techs are much more reliable than the run o the mill brands, although they are made by WD but with better components 

Hard to find in Thailand, Invade list them on their website but never seem to be available so I got my from Amazon & had to suck up the shipping and tax on top.

 

If you want a drive larger than 3tb to store your complete digital life on it, I would invest in a more reliable brand/model.

All mechanical drives will fail eventually & you don’t know when.

SSDs are still too expensive for the larger Ext Tb, but that is the way to go if your feeling flush.

 

 

I tried to google tunderbolt 3 G Technology and only got a Verizon thunderbolt cell phone. Was there a typo perhaps? I am interested in the device.

 

Ahh update I searched for G-tech found a 10tb Thunderbolt external drive at B&H for $487.77. B&H ships worldwide and does not charge any tax on shipments outside the US. They also offer DHL shipping cheaper and more reliable than lousy Fed Ex. 

 
Edited by Grumpy Duck
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4 hours ago, sometimewoodworker said:
On 12/28/2017 at 12:28 AM, steven2018 said:

I prefer solid state SSD drives. Small, Quiet and Fast.

 

Mirroring your drives is important for data backup in case of main drive(s) failure.

And expensive 

 

SSD's are great as your boot drive where you keep the OS and your programs, but not viable for an 8 TB  video library.  Anyone who has ever priced out 8 TB of SSD's probably needed smelling salts to bring them back around when they were knocked over.

 

I still remember my first 8088 Radio Shack PC (bought it half price at $800) that came without a HD and I couldn't afford the $400 for a 10 MB HD.  I did spring the $48 to upgrade from 384 KB of RAM to 640 KB.  (Keep in mind that back then, a case of beer cost about $8-10.)

 

Edited by impulse
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