320GB External USB Powered 2.5" Mini Portable Hard Drive
by Oyen Digital
(Click here)
Digital product summary information
Manufacturer: Oyen DigitalProduct features:
- USB-powered no external power supply needed
- Plug-and-play connectivity with PC and Macintosh Computers
- Whisper quiet operation
- Includes NovaStor's award-winning NovaBackup?? 10 for Windows ($49.95 retail)
Digital camera reviews of 320GB External USB Powered 2.5" Mini Portable Hard Drive
Digital camera Review: What `mission critical' element of your computer is most likely to fail ...
Summary: 5 Stars
... causing you to miss a deadline, waste time, or lose data?
If you are in the 89.37% of the computing world that uses MS-Windows (1) that element would be the operating system.
Over the decades, I have had power-supplies, mother boards, memory sticks, disk drives, disk controllers, CPUs and other hardware elements all fail at inopportune times. But the single most common failure that I have is that of the MS-Windows operating system. Of note, I have NEVER had LINUX fail to boot due to a software error, but for affordable, cutting edge image and video editing Windows is the only game in town.
Last week I was trying to finish an important presentation for a scientific meeting. I had, at most, ten hours to finish it up. Booting my 2 month old quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 6 TB of storage, dual video-card monster it hung on the Windows-XP splash screen - though it had been fine that very morning, and I had installed nothing in the interval. Tried, failed, again, then went with the F8 "pick your poison" boot key. Choose "last known good". No Joy.
Well, the heck with it. Will boot safe-mode and roll back to a couple of days ago (just to be safe). Hung booting in safe-mode. Great. Now what? Cannot access the disks on the failed computer - unless I open it and remove them to another machine. To sort out the failed boot will take anywhere from 30 min to 8 hours, to a complete Windows reinstall, and I do NOT have the time (Fixed now, and it took just over an hour to sort it).
Fortunately for the past 8 months or so I have been using this portable disk WD320 drive as my main work drive, backing it up to the system RAID-0 at the end of each work session. All of the files for the presentation, and the presentation itself were on the portable drive, essentially only the backups were on the failed computer.
So, I simply started my main backup desktop (I have two others) and plugged my Wonderful WD320 into it expecting to get right back to work on the presentation. Sadly, the drive immediately started acting flakey - triggering, and retriggering, the "found new hardware daemon." It is never just one thing. Hoping for the best, I used the USB cord from my previous WD160 drive, which fixed the problem.
The point of all this is that the existence of large capacity, quite fast (I use the WD320 for video editing) portable external USB drives has changed how I use my computer. The actual work drive, with all the live data files, is the portable external. The internal drives on the computer are used for storage of completed work, backups of current projects, unimportant current projects, scratch disks, index disks, system and program disks. I do not rely upon internal drives for the storage of my current projects. If I had, once again, a Windows failure would have taken precious time from the little that I had left.
This series of events has also prompted me to get, yet another large, external drive for backup of the backups of the internal drives. My older computers all have these, but I was relying upon the RAID-0 on this computer to obviate that need. The near failure of the WD320 pointed out the need for another easily accessible - thus external - backup drive for the computer. Indeed, I am thinking that my next computer will have only a system drive, and a scratch drive internally, all other drives will be external.
If you value your data and your time buy this WD320 - but use it as your main data drive, and use the computer's internal drives as backup, instead of the other way around.
[...]
Summary of 320GB External USB Powered 2.5" Mini Portable Hard Drive
The model UN2 external USB 2.0 hard drive provides a fast and easy way to add more storage! It is compatible with PCs and MACs (laptops/desktops) and is powered using the included USB 2.0 cable eliminating the need for a power adapter! The stylish black enclosure features a unique aluminum body engineered to effectively dissipate heat and allow for silent operation! The included NovaBackup?? software eliminates the need to push a button or click an icon to activate a backup. The software can operate automatically in the background saving your files to the drive while you work! Everything you need to backup your data is in the box!Cameras and Photo
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