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Originally Posted by Feelingpink Having spent today in a technical photographic seminar, one of the big messages was back-up and the guy lecturing said of external hard drives "It's not a question of if they will fail, but a question of when". Apparently the biggest enemy of hard drives is heat and external ones are more likely to feel this than internal ones. So choose whatever system seems appropriate ... then back up! |
These drives do seem to fail quite often. In particular it seems quite common to lose the data without the hardware failing (data recovery tools might get it back).
Mechanical knocks and unexpected disconnection often do make life difficult for data on external hard drives.
Heat may be an issue for some poorly designed external drives, but in theory with so more surface to play with external drives could run cooler.
If the data is re-creatable data such as ripped CDs, or itself a backup that sort of takes into account failure by whatever cause.
Once consideration is while much more expensive per Gb the smaller drives usually survive being dropped ( experimental observation ).
As far as system requirements they often are as high as they are because of bundled software. I've had no problems with a 6 year old laptop using an external DVD writer and hard drive over USB 2.0.