aldi-500GB hard drive 109€

confuzed

ALDI offers from Thursday-
500GB medion external hard drive 109.99€. Has USB2 and eSATA interface.
4GB pen drive- 16.99€, read 12MB, write 4MB.

myself planning 2 buy both of these items.

jameshayes

This one?

jameshayes

An additional 500GB to boost and expand your PC and notebook’s capacity, speed and capability.

8MB cach. 7200rpm
eSATA connector (transfer rate max. 1200 MBits/sec)
USB 2.0 connector (transfer rate max. 480 MBits/sec)
Accessories: USB cable, AC adaptor, desktop stand

.

masterwriter

is this a good brand? I might return the 99.99 euro 320GB Lidl drive and get this. An extra 180 GB for a 9 euro

flogen

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=333054

This probably works out the same once delivery is added but it's a decent brandname, probably more reliable (better support if something goes wrong etc.)

ch750536

I have one of these, they are fine. Read in a thread elsewhere that they are western digital drives.

Can't confirm without trashing it though.

coldfire1x

Aldi ones comes with 3yr warrany, cant really go woring with that

slave1

be there early!!!!

flogen

coldfire1x wrote: »

Aldi ones comes with 3yr warrany, cant really go woring with that

Yeah, but in my experience with a Medion PC, on the rare occasion that you have a problem they're a nightmare to get in contact with and get an issue resolved - and obviously Aldi won't give a crap about your broken HDD!

Boggles

flogen wrote: »

Yeah, but in my experience with a Medion PC, on the rare occasion that you have a problem they're a nightmare to get in contact with and get an issue resolved - and obviously Aldi won't give a crap about your broken HDD!

Is the warranty with Medion or Aldi. Consumer law 101 would assume it is with Aldi.

mickoneill30

coldfire1x wrote: »

Aldi ones comes with 3yr warrany, cant really go woring with that

The Komplett one above comes with 5 years. In all cases this just covers the drive not data. Don't forget to backup.

confuzed

if anyone ever tried eSATA connection?

coldfire1x

mickoneill30 wrote: »

The Komplett one above comes with 5 years. In all cases this just covers the drive not data. Don't forget to backup.

Backup of 500gb hdd.... hmmm... keep another 500gb hdd?

witnessmenow

Alway use esata when im using my pc, Very noticeable difference in speed( i believe its up to 6X faster)

BostonB

mickoneill30 wrote: »

The Komplett one above comes with 5 years. In all cases this just covers the drive not data. Don't forget to backup.

Makes sense to buy two and have one as backup as the other.

ch750536

No, that makes no sense at all.

damien

flogen wrote: »

Yeah, but in my experience with a Medion PC, on the rare occasion that you have a problem they're a nightmare to get in contact with and get an issue resolved - and obviously Aldi won't give a crap about your broken HDD!

My FreeAgent died yesterday. All data gone. Seems it's happening a lot and nothing can be done. Been using it a month.

Biro

In my experience I wouldn't buy any hard disk unless it came from Western Digital, Maxtor or Seagate. Seagate bought Maxtor now, so this http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=345226 is an option, or this http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=343423 .
3 of my mates rushed for cheap external hard drives from Lidl before, all regreted it.

BostonB

ch750536 wrote: »

No, that makes no sense at all.

Explain...

zAbbo

But what will we backup the backup backups on ?

Dr. Nick

As mentioned in my other thread, I'd love one that can plug into the TV....

degsie

Dr. Nick wrote: »

As mentioned in my other thread, I'd love one that can plug into the TV....

Can't you connect the usb port into the 'ariel in' on your TV. An old wire coathanger should do the trick

witnessmenow

degsie wrote: »

Can't you connect the usb port into the 'ariel in' on your TV. An old wire coathanger should do the trick

You do realise some idiot will probably try that!

ch750536

BostonB wrote: »

Explain...

Use the same drive as a backup, naa, use another make \brand\type\power supply to eliminate the most common fault on drives, poor manufacturing.

The chances of buying 2 faulty drives at the same time are far far higher than buying 2 faulty drives of different brands.

BostonB

ch750536 wrote: »

Use the same drive as a backup, naa, use another make \brand\type\power supply to eliminate the most common fault on drives, poor manufacturing.

The chances of buying 2 faulty drives at the same time are far far higher than buying 2 faulty drives of different brands.

Define far higher and in what circumstance. The majority of people have no backup. Especially people who buy external drives, they usually fill it and then don't have back up of all that data. So with that in mind I think having two drive identical or not is a huge improvement in data security.

You're talking about a situation like in a RAID or internal drives in the same machine. where both drives will have the same running time. with an external drive This is less likely. You only switch the 2nd one on for back up.
It would be better to have two dissimilar drives, but thats expecting far two much of the average home user.

I've never had two drives die at the same time, even in a disk cluster. closest has been within a few days of each other. That said I don't work with servers very often or do a lot of disk intensive stuff very often. Maybe you'd see it more if thats what you do.

zod

Dr. Nick wrote: »

As mentioned in my other thread, I'd love one that can plug into the TV....

then buy one of these

http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/638604/art/iomega/screenplay-360-gb-usb-2-0.html

or

http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/525074/art/storex/mediaplayer-club-mpix-355.html

Plays xvid/divx straight into scart

well worth the extra couple of euro

BostonB

zod wrote: »

then buy one of these

http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/638604/art/iomega/screenplay-360-gb-usb-2-0.html

or

http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/525074/art/storex/mediaplayer-club-mpix-355.html

Plays xvid/divx straight into scart

well worth the extra couple of euro

Have you got either?

mickoneill30

BostonB wrote: »

I've never had two drives die at the same time, even in a disk cluster. closest has been within a few days of each other. That said I don't work with servers very often o do a lot of disk intensive stuff very often. Maybe you'd see it more if thats what you do.

I do work with servers. You don't see it very often there either. If you buy 20 of one model in one go you're going to get the same make HDDs obviously. You do get failures but I've never lost a RAID because 2 HDDs went down at the same time. It's not impossible but the odds must be tiny.

ch750536

mickoneill30 wrote: »

I do work with servers. You don't see it very often there either. If you buy 20 of one model in one go you're going to get the same make HDDs obviously. You do get failures but I've never lost a RAID because 2 HDDs went down at the same time. It's not impossible but the odds must be tiny.

Without going off topic too much, if you are setting up a raid 0 or 1 then you are not really using raid as intended, well, not exactly anyway, as either of these systems are useless with regards to integrity. (Not quite...)

Consider this, lets say a courier dropped a box of drives, making them a bit wobbly. What are the chances of buying 2 wobbly drives from the same place if 1 is already wobbly.

You know it makes sense.

zod

BostonB wrote: »

Have you got either?

yes I've owned both types

mickoneill30

ch750536 wrote: »

Consider this, lets say a courier dropped a box of drives, making them a bit wobbly. What are the chances of buying 2 wobbly drives from the same place if 1 is already wobbly.

I don't think the chances would be enough to make me buy two different drives.

BostonB

zod wrote: »

yes I've owned both types

Which did you prefer and why. I interested in getting one of those. Which has the best remote for example?

ch750536

mickoneill30 wrote: »

I don't think the chances would be enough to make me buy two different drives.

Cool, was just pointing it out.

BostonB

ch750536 wrote: »

Without going off topic too much, if you are setting up a raid 0 or 1 then you are not really using raid as intended, well, not exactly anyway, as either of these systems are useless with regards to integrity. (Not quite...)

Consider this, lets say a courier dropped a box of drives, making them a bit wobbly. What are the chances of buying 2 wobbly drives from the same place if 1 is already wobbly.

You know it makes sense.

No one mentioned RAID 0 or 1?

Hypothetical scenarios are all well and good but I've not seen it happen in many years of IT. I've never seen people mix disks in large disk arrays. If it was that significant then I would assume they'd do that. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway the same disk as a backup is better than no backup.

zod

BostonB wrote: »

Which did you prefer and why. I interested in getting one of those. Which has the best remote for example?

remote and menu system is basic for both systems with the iomega winning by a whisker, seemed a bit more intuitive .. the storex tries to give a thumbnail preview of the movies .. which slows everything down .. I've used about 4 types of the hd players now and none really standout from a menu / remote point of view.

the_syco

zAbbo wrote: »

But what will we backup the backup backups on ?

Tape. Tape has been proven to be reliable for the long term. Other than that, on a reliable (expensive) DVD's. Cheap 75cent DVD's won't last that long (long being more than a 2 years).

BostonB

zod wrote: »

remote and menu system is basic for both systems with the iomega winning by a whisker, seemed a bit more intuitive .. the storex tries to give a thumbnail preview of the movies .. which slows everything down .. I've used about 4 types of the hd players now and none really standout from a menu / remote point of view.

Ok cheers for that.

zeusnero

Have to agree with the previous poster as regards the iomega screenplay - it's sheer class and well worth the price (I have 2 and bought 2 others for friends)

Also Iomega products (both Iomega manufactured and rebranded) tend to be high quality - in total i've hard 4 hard drive crashes since 1998 :1 was hitachi, 1 was Seagate, 2 were Iomega. The Iomega crashes were completely my own fault though through lack of care.

Moral of the story: Hard drives crash. It's just a question of when. So,always back up everything that is important to you - movies and music are easy enough to find again - not so with pictures and documents...

jayteecork

zod wrote: »

then buy one of these

http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/638604/art/iomega/screenplay-360-gb-usb-2-0.html

or

http://www.pixmania.com/ie/uk/525074/art/storex/mediaplayer-club-mpix-355.html

Plays xvid/divx straight into scart

well worth the extra couple of euro

Stay an absolute million miles away from pixmania.
I tried to order an external hard drive off them last week. They accepted my order, debited my card then the next day then DEMANDED a scan of my passport and a scan of a utility bill. I found this ludicrous after they debited my card but against my better judgement I emailed them the documents.
But apparently this still wasn't good enough and they demanded me to fax them the documents instead. WTF?
Anyway I cancelled the order immediately and I am still waiting on a refund.

I went with this instead:
http://www.dabs.ie/productview.aspx?QuickLinx=4HMJ

Capt'n Midnight

BostonB wrote: »

Makes sense to buy two and have one as backup as the other.

actually you woudl be slightly better off buying a second one from a different batch in case of a "bad batch"

BostonB

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

actually you woudl be slightly better off buying a second one from a different batch in case of a "bad batch"

Sigh. Do you have ANY stats to back that up. How likely a drive from the same is likely to fail. Have you had it happen? How often?

Capt'n Midnight

the_syco wrote: »

Tape. Tape has been proven to be reliable for the long term. Other than that, on a reliable (expensive) DVD's. Cheap 75cent DVD's won't last that long (long being more than a 2 years).

so should a HDD in a sealed bag (to stop oil evaporation)

Tape is a complete pig to restore if you don't have the right software / tape unit / firmware. Tapes can last 30 years. But finding a tape drive / software to restore that tape - good luck.

stuff like having to go back to NT4 sp3 because they changed the compression algorithm in later service packs
and don't get me started on DLT's lack of backward compatability
Vs80 drives won't re-use DLT IV's formatted in another drive
SDLT drives are a disaster with DLT tape header - it fits the manual says it works, but in reality it just loves to eat the tape

I really hate Arcserve and Backup Exec , they don't do you any favours when it comes to old tapes, a lot of the time you can't restore till you index the tape - which takes as long as a full restore



IDE drives from the first 286 will work in the latest PC and visa versa, at the worst you would have to buy a controller card and set the drive parameters manually. And if the drive dies the data can be recovered, at a cost. You also get to keep the filesystem and file permissions too.

bk

BostonB wrote: »

Sigh. Do you have ANY stats to back that up. How likely a drive from the same is likely to fail. Have you had it happen? How often?

Yes, Google released a fantastic paper with an analysis of HDD performance and failure across their massive server farms, you can find the paper here:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

This tallys with my own experience, we buy many HDD for our server test lab in work and we often see multiple HDD failures from the same batches.

It isn't an issue for us as our test server lab is only for running test suites, so no important data is lost, however for important servers with data we always mix HDD from different manufacturers in our RAID arrays.

My advice to people is always have three copies of your data with at least one copy off site.

For instance from my non tech savy sisters, with lots of digtal photos of baby and family trips, they keep one copy on their laptop, one copy on an external HDD and one copy on a different brand HDD that I keep for them in my house.

They are very happy with this, the expense of a different brand external HDD is relatively minor compared to the emotional impact if they were to lose their photos.

BTW the reason for keeping one copy of site, is what happens if your house gets broken into or burned down?

jayteecork

All this photo stuff sounds very Blade Runner.
"Did you get your precious photos?"

Capt'n Midnight

BostonB wrote: »

Sigh. Do you have ANY stats to back that up. How likely a drive from the same is likely to fail. Have you had it happen? How often?

Worst was Dell P3 desktops we've had 50% failure rate on Quantum Fireballs (by name and by nature) over three years.

Roughly 5% of the servers we've got have had a drive fail in the first two months.

laptops it's hard to tell since they get bounced and dropped, they aren't meant to be moved in use

Look up the names of the hard drive companies that no longer exist or got of the market , there was a race to the bottom to provide the biggest cheapest drives rather than the most reliable ones. Hard drives are the one PC component that got LESS reliable over time. SMART reporting means you can predict drive failure up to 50% of the time. even taking that into account they are worse.

Head crashes could possibly be drastically reduced by performing RAID between the platters on an individual drive.

that pdf suggests that high temp will increase the risk of drives in year three. laptop drives would typically run hot

jayteecork

So if you just use the Hard Drive for storage and not be running anything off it does that prolong its life?
Say I had a bunch of movies on one and just transfered the file to my laptop to watch then turn off the external hard drive?

Surely it will keep indefinitely this way?

Capt'n Midnight

jayteecork wrote: »

So if you just use the Hard Drive for storage and not be running anything off it does that prolong its life?

Yes.

Surely it will keep indefinitely this way?

No.
the lubricating oil will still evaporate
drives can fail at any time with no warning

jayteecork

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Yes.

No.
the lubricating oil will still evaporate
drives can fail at any time with no warning

Lubricating oil eh? I'm intrigued. First I've ever heard of it.
Can this oil be replaced?

bk

jayteecork wrote: »

Say I had a bunch of movies on one and just transfered the file to my laptop to watch then turn off the external hard drive?

If your data is important to you, here is some advice:

1) Always keep three copies of everything.
2) Use different manufacturers for each and if possibly different technology (also consider tape and optical disc).
3) Keep at least one copy off site.
4) Every few year, as prices come down and capacity increases, buy new media (HDDs, optical discs, tapes, etc.) and transfer your media from the old media to the new.
5) If any of the three fail or indicate that they will fail, then quickly replace it.

BTW A convenient way of keeping three copies of everything while reducing cost is to do it in conjunction with family or friends you trust, backing up pictures, etc. on each others HDD.

jayteecork

This is all news to me.
Just shows that I haven't a clue.
I thought those things would last for decades.

BostonB

bk wrote: »

Yes, Google released a fantastic paper with an analysis of HDD performance and failure across their massive server farms, you can find the paper here:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

This tallys with my own experience, we buy many HDD for our server test lab in work and we often see multiple HDD failures from the same batches.

It isn't an issue for us as our test server lab is only for running test suites, so no important data is lost, however for important servers with data we always mix HDD from different manufacturers in our RAID arrays.

My advice to people is always have three copies of your data with at least one copy off site.

For instance from my non tech savy sisters, with lots of digtal photos of baby and family trips, they keep one copy on their laptop, one copy on an external HDD and one copy on a different brand HDD that I keep for them in my house.

They are very happy with this, the expense of a different brand external HDD is relatively minor compared to the emotional impact if they were to lose their photos.

BTW the reason for keeping one copy of site, is what happens if your house gets broken into or burned down?

Can you quote where in that PDF it gives stats on how likely a drive is to fail if another one in the same batch fails or any stats on when drives from the same batch fail at the same time.

Did you read that paper? It actually says "....all result show in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly by population mix...with the exception of seek error" even then its focused on same drive manufacturer rather than drive model or batch. I can't see anywhere where it mentions same batch drives failing at the same time. But I might have missed it.