What do you do with 2tb external drive?

[Rivers]

If your laptop has a PCI-X card slot, get one with the fastest ports on that drive. Probably eSATA. That should get your speed up.

[2shotjoe]

If your laptop has a PCI-X card slot, get one with the fastest ports on that drive. Probably eSATA. That should get your speed up.

or if you have an extra HDD slow, open it up and attach the ext HDD to it with eSATA to SATA.

[axel4488]

^This^ HD movies take up 6-12 gigs each, and when you have a few hundred of them, they tend to take up a lot of space. I know my roommate has upwards of 5TB of hard disk space and most of it is full of movies and music.

umm what? I have all 720p to 1080i blu-ray movies and not one of them is over 5 gigs in size. You sir, have been torrenting in some unsavory places.

[high_revs]

this is primarily what i have. but i currently have same files on my laptop too. and backing up the laptop on an external hdd (as posted above about having it in 3 existing in 3 places). that 3rd one should really be in the safe but i carry it in my bag as my immediate file backup. i've been burned before of my laptop drive going bad, then my second hdd external backup going bad at same time. and i just wiped clean my 3rd external one to do clean-up and backup from scratch (too many OS images).

Casual_shooter, the NAS can also be accessible via your windows explorer/file manager. HTTP is one option and migth be easier (might not have to do netuse /delete to disconnect since the path stays on the location bar (directory path)

with a nas, you can have disk mirroring. 2 disks basically exact images of each other. with your current setup and you said you had hdd failures before, that can go bad and you have no redundancy. i'm a little technical and it did take me a little time to figure out how to access the nas, but i wasn't really reading closely either .

one thing i learned for my nas, it's freaking slow to move files to usb. it kills my network moving files from nas to a laptop (7gb file). so i plug a usb to move it there instead and it's a pitiful slow speed. (150kbps or something like that?). windows 7 estimates 13 hours? LOL

i've not used the nas' backup program (yet). but i figure you can configure it to do scheduled backups over the network. if you're buying a router in the near future, new ones also have usb to allow a usb hdd to be connected to be shared in the network, ala nas. (probably just simple share).

A NAS (network-attached storage) is a drive that has a small processor in it and an Ethernet port. Simply looks a slightly large hard drive, but you plug it directly into your home/work network with an Ethernet cable (rather than attaching the drive to a computer). The drive can be physically anywhere there is a Ethernet network connection and power.

There will be instructions with it, but basically you access the device through a web page where you can set whatever options it offers. It then shows up on your network like it is another computer. In Windows, you can assign it a drive letter if you want, and in Mac, you can put an alias to it on your desktop.

A cool feature on most consumer-oriented NAS is the ability to create directories with different access credentials. So you can have your own space on the drive to store your files (with its own login/password), while your kids could have one of their own (or one for each kid) with their own password.

[yellowsulphur]

I have a 2tb seagate (which I'm feeling so much more secure about after reading yellows post /sarcasm) that holds my music and daily backups.

I hate the fact I can't rely on one external drive, but after losing an Iomega and a Western Digital external drive to the gremlin gods, I don't trust them anymore than I trust my computer's HD.

Thinking it's time to start looking to Cloud solutions but my is still tightly attached to my head which prevents me from looking too far in that direction.

I'm sure your drive will be fine. There is a lot of good info in this thread on how to back up the data that is important to you. As for cloud solutions remember Gmail takes attachments up to 20 MB in size and it's free. Google Docs is kinda neat as well and I think you get a GB free there.
I really did make a clock out of my Maxtor 80GB drive. I no longer have it, but I did find the link I used on how to do it.

http://alan-parekh.com/projects/hard-drive-clock/

[Bonedoc]

Yellow 'et al' is correct... three locations is great, two is an absolute must. Went from a long time XP based system with 1TB backup 'internal' and 1TB 'external.' Upgraded to Win 7 64 Pro and that internal was 'not' readable (NTFS as well, just would not view). Plugged it into a USB external adapter, got it all but for a moment it was concerning as I had not done a last minute cross over backup and was missing about 200Gs of video. Two places are a must.

[loose_electron]

In the future - get WD drives no Seagate. Better quality.

copies in 3 places makes a lot of sense.

[Cokebottle]

Pray it doesn't develop the Seagate Click of Death and grenade your data. 2 TB is a lot of data to have on one device. I've had problems with drives from Seagate and Maxtor which is a company Seagate acquired. I did make a cool clock from the platters of one of the Maxtor drives though.

Been running nothing but Maxtor for the last 15+ years.
Computers run 24/7, no standby... Never had a drive related issue.

[ibanezfoo]

Been running nothing but Maxtor for the last 15+ years.
Computers run 24/7, no standby... Never had a drive related issue.

Thats because you don't power your drives down. Its the spinning up and spinning down all the times that wears them out faster.

[hcbr]

rip my bluray movies onto it, have about 9 of them (18tb total) , running a media server at home on a gigabit network. I also store all my music, personal documents, and Pron lol

[SuperSet]

Interesting that I haven't heard any videographers chime in yet. I've started putting together DSLR video with my Panasonic GH2 and it eats up space like a mother. The latest DSLRs are recording at insane bit rates. I'm talking filling up a 32GB card with 25 minutes of video!

[esskay]

I've got 3TBs 2/3 full of photos and videos.... all my own... no pron, bittorrent, etc. DSLRs and HD video really add up fast!