External hard drive

Hi David.
I lost my hard drives while in Cape York. I replace it with a 500 G Solid State drive. A lot faster and no more hassle's. Steve.B...

The Lacie™ 'Rugged' ext drives are pocket size and magic to use. Come in a soft rubber protective shroud. Look great too. I back all my Mac's on them. Suggest you always carry the external HDD on top of the lappie but with an elastic band holding the two together to increase the mass. Bear in mind that the HDD has already weathered a fair few bumps & grinds long before your supplier received it, and survived. Place the in the vehicle close to the centre area in respect to the front & rear axles to minimise jolts. Place the units on some forgiving materials like clothing, bedding or soft foam rubber and you will be ok to do a Dakar no worries. No doubt you will have aired down your rubber for corrugations. Enjoy the adventure.My Cape York raft building Wenlock River pix etc.

It has nothing to do with padding the outside on ANY DRIVE that is the problem if its moving whilst working
Its the extremely small gap between the platter and the head which moves across it. Sometimes just a gentle bump can be eough to make the head hit the platter and its all over Rover.

What happens to it when its not working bears no relation to the above.
A drive when not working PARKS the head in such a way that it can absorb knocks without problems. It can therefore be transported just sitting on a shelf as mine does in the van. Has done 50,000k without damage but never turned on when moving.

Get the facts straight please.

But not everyone is as "careful" as you "Grumpy Graham",......
:-)

A "pelican case" is a good investment, the one we have can fit the laptop in it and all sorts of other bits for it......
Yes it is lined with foam as well, i will check but i think that fact is right and may even be straight .... will check that :-)

I was referring to RockyOnes comment about that they have been knocked about on delivery

As I said carrying them turned off doesn't matter its running them when moving that can cause the damage.
The head is a lot less than a hairsbreadth from the platter I have dropped one from an inch above a desk and stuffed it when it was working. Stupid I know but does happen.
Even in a Pelican case (expensive but good) if you dropped it with a drive running in it could damage it if you were unlucky

I'm not grumpy about it but some post incorrect or ill informed information that gets taken by the gullible as gospel.

Have pulled drives to bits and you can barely see between the two parts.

Incidentally the magnets in them make great pickup tool for bolts and screws
They are the strongest magnets for their size I have ever seen

Cheers I will go back to my cave LOL

Hi Alan - i do all of that with my photos! I copy every night to a USB drive. They must be on three different media before i format the camera card. CDs or DVDs get posted home about once a month. Box of USB drives comes into the car whilst other copies stay in caravan during travel.

Yes they are but the same applies as I posted above to any drive with a moving write head.

Carry it turned off

Never use it in a moving vehicle to be safe.

In saying that one inside the laptop will be more forgiving but still possible to damage one.

A lot of the portables are actually laptop drives for that very reason Easy to tell by their actual size.

IMHO the only respondent who got it completely right is Motherhen who does what we do with our photos which are backed up onto -

1.DVD 2. External Hard drive 3. USB flash drive and 4. the data backup of the laptop's hard disk itself.

You are doing hard disk backups aren't you? I learnt about that the hard way - but lucky for me the digital camera I was using at the time was an old Sony and I still had the photos on the 3 1/2 " floppies.

Take a spare memory card for your camera and use that if one gets full. Never, ever delete pictures until all backups have been done.

Seems like overkill but Hey! its a lot better than losing the stuff - nothing can replace lost photos. And just to make the whole thing complete we a take flash drive loaded with the best shots to a dealer where we can get them printed for 10 cents each.

And for those who don't have an external hard drive right now next week starting Thursday 29 July Aldi are selling external hard drives for $79 - capacity 1TB (1000GB) usually disclaimers, no connection, yada,yada - but you can bet I'll be the first one in the queue at the local store.

We can't understand why anyone would be trying to do backups while moving anyway - that's when the camera should be out shooting more pics!

Hope we have saved at least one person's photos - the rant will have been worth it.

Regards, John and Michelle