Recommendations On A Hard Drive

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Well, FAT32 is what I was at 32 and NTFS means Not That Fat Since. ..

FAT stands for File Allocation Table and 32 for 32 bit .. designed way back in '77 .. It was the standard for keeping track of files on a disc .. kept in one section of the drive. It's common, works in lots of things, but has a 4Gb file limit (due to the 32 bit part) and a 2Tb drive limit. NTFS stands for NT File System .. released in the early 90s .. came with the NT operating system and was originally designed for servers. It handles larger files and drives.

For most users, not much difference .. If you use larger drives or large video files, then you'll see an issue.
 
How do you determine what type any drive has?
If the drive is on your system, double click on My Computer or This PC (Win 10) and right click on the drive letter of the drive in question .. it will tell you how it's formatted.
 
Guys guys guys - remember the bigger you go and the more info you store on one drive

the worst you are at losing all that info

try and stagger them using SSD drives more less likely to lose 8TB of data in one go

just letting you know there is a downsize at going big!! or I should say going too BIG
 
Guys guys guys - remember the bigger you go and the more info you store on one drive

the worst you are at losing all that info

try and stagger them using SSD drives more less likely to lose 8TB of data in one go

just letting you know there is a downsize at going big!! or I should say going too BIG

I have 2 of the Seagate Backup Plus 8tb drives. Been using them for a while and totally happy. I have a scheduled process that wakes up each night and does a robocopy to keep them both in sync. So far, so good.
 
Rick remember no hard drive is 100% safe just so you know
that it can happen with the TOP of the range hard drives they fail

I say this as a community service as I see hard drives die in business all the time and they try and blame me

oh well have a nice day then
 
I'm relatively certain, at this stage of the DJ digital ballgame, that everyone has experienced the tragedy of data loss albeit a bad drive or a failed machine or an "I wonder what this will do" disastrous moment.

Backing up your data to external sources, as DJ Dennis pointed out, has become fairly common knowledge yet the reminder is always a wake up call for those who don't have a backup routine as part of their office policies.

Taking it one step beyond a routine backup is to have a complete working system updated regularly (weekly) and stored off-prem. Having 20 backups will do one no good whatsoever if they are all in stored in one dwelling. A fire; a burglary; any natural disaster, then what? In my region, this has happened to two DJs. (one fire, one tornado). Lost everything, including contract and client data.

Please! Don't let it happen to you.

Keep a backup / cloned machine and backup data drives off premise at friends or family member's home and rotate an updated copy weekly. Backup business and client data to a cloud storage source (and don't forget the user name and password, as I have once, or twice, or more.)
 
Guys guys guys - remember the bigger you go and the more info you store on one drive

the worst you are at losing all that info

try and stagger them using SSD drives more less likely to lose 8TB of data in one go

just letting you know there is a downsize at going big!! or I should say going too BIG

I have a media server I built back in 2008-2009; can't remember exactly. I don't even remember what motherboard or processor I put in it.[emoji1]
It runs on Open SuSe 11, and it has been running 24/7 for all these years without so much as a hiccup. The only times it has been shut down is during power outages or when approaching storms were predicted to cause power outages. It has three 1TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. Started to worry that a crash had to be eminent (that was about a year ago).
I had it backed up to a backup server (also SuSe 11), but the backup server also backed up my computers, and was running short on disk space, so I built 3 new NAS's... one as a backup system to backup my computers, one for data (documents, photos, movies, software installations and miscellaneous files), and one for music. I copied everything from my SuSe media server to either the data or the music NAS, and then back everything up to the backup NAS.
I'm sure the SuSe media server will crash one day so I'm glad I have these new NAS's to replace it when it happens. The NAS's are running NAS4Free, and they are fast... much faster than the SuSe server, and seem to be just as bulletproof. They've been running 24/7 for about a year now. I built each one with an SSD system drive, and RAID data arrays with 2TB drives. I think these will do me for a couple or three years. We'll see. Here's a pic of my server rack...


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I like a nice rack.:laugh:

I even have my headphones rack mounted:laugh:...

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I have a QNAP NAS Raid array running with 2x2Tb and 2x3Tb drives, so 5Tb of mirrored storage. Planning on swapping out the 2Tb for 4Tb drives soon, so I'll up it to 7Tb.

Do need to find a good cloud backup for part of that .. at least 4Tb (pictures, some videos, etc.).
 
Rick remember no hard drive is 100% safe just so you know
that it can happen with the TOP of the range hard drives they fail

I say this as a community service as I see hard drives die in business all the time and they try and blame me

oh well have a nice day then

Exactly correct, that's why I have the 2nd drive as a backup to the first. Our entire photo library is on them. On the DJ side, I download music to my main laptop. At each gig, I pull out a 1 TB usb drive, then update it (robocopy) with my updated library from the main laptop. This then gets updated to a 2nd laptop, which is setup as a secondary playback unit. I replicate the playlist from the main unit to the secondary and as I fire off each special event song on the main, I fire it off on the secondary (with the volume turned off). If the main unit goes down, just up the volume on the 2nd. Seems to be working so far (knock on wood) and I have to admit, not having that 2nd unit in sync makes me really nervous.
 
Well a wake up call is ALWAYS a good thing - people that think they are safe are crazy

you NEVER know what will happen at ANYTIME

but if no one mentions about keeping copies JUST IN CASE is mad

so what ever you do - DO NOT COME COMPLACIENT
then think your safe

have a nice day all