I've been a bit worried about my lack of backups lately since my WHS died. I still have one NAS but one of the two drives in it reports as being dead. (Probably I could get it back by hitting it with the handle of a screwdriver when the power is off; likely the problem is the seek head is jammed. But it's been months and it's RAID and I don't know what would happen after that. Not worth the risk.)

A better answer is to have some other backup. A while back I bought six 128G USB2 flash disks and this evening I rolled copies of a bunch of my anime onto three of them. But you'd be surprised how few series will fit on 128G. My Railgun directory is 71G all by itself.

So another visit to NewEgg was warranted, and by damn they were selling 512G USB3 flash drives for about $250 each. So I just ordered two of them, and they're supposed to arrive on Tuesday, and we'll see how it goes.

Turns out all the USB ports on my computer are USB 3. The new drives are nominally rated 250MB/s write speed. I don't expect to make that, but surely these will be faster than the USB2 sticks I bought last time, which have been averaging about 12MB/s.

One reason I won't reach 250MB/s is that my NAS, where my anime is stored, can't feed data to me that fast. But it surely can exceed 12 MB/s.

I hope.

Regardless, even if these new drives are not very fast, this is 1TB of reliable storage that can't lock up because of a sticking seek head. And that's worthwhile all by itself.

(Oh, and by the way: this post is not a request for suggestions or advice. Just thought I'd mention that.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 08:29 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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