Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 August 24

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August 24

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1. How can I upload these old photos about Tsar bomb to commons?
2. How to correct these images?
3. When Can I upload any logos or posters to Commons?and By any license? --ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 11:08, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Should I buy 2 TB or 4 TB USB hard drives?

My Fedora 20 Linux system recently informed me that the two LaCie Neil Poulton 1 TB USB hard drives I routinely back up my files to have less than half a gigabyte free space left. As I take over one hundred megabytes worth of photographs every day, this will run out soon. I can free up some space by running rsync --delete which will delete all the files from the USB drives that I have already deleted from my main drive. But even this won't suffice for long. So I need to upgrade to larger drives. But should I buy 2 TB USB drives, like my current internal drive is (with my current rate, it will only run out of space in April 2019), or go straight to 4 TB USB drives? Verkkokauppa.com sells 2 TB USB drives for 125 € and 4 TB USB drives for 165 €. That's not much of a difference in price considering the difference in size. But with 4 TB USB drives, it looks like 2 TB is just going to waste until I need to upgrade my internal drive as well. But then I remember even computer magazines in the early 1990s saying "buy the biggest drive you can afford", at a time when hard drive capacities were in the order of tens of megabytes, not terabytes. Can anyone advise me here? JIP | Talk 18:26, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

If we look at this purely economically, 40 € for an extra 2 TB sounds like a good deal, but you won't need those extra 2 TB for another 5 years, by which time the price might well have dropped below that. Add to that the possibilities that the hard drive might fail before that or that you might stop taking so many photos, and the extra 2 TB seems to be of even less value. Also, the 2 TB drive you buy 5 years from now is likely to be faster.

And advice to buy the most expensive item you can afford, when the price of those items is steadily dropping, seems terrible, to me. If the prices were skyrocketing, then that might make sense on an individual level (although it might make the problem worse, overall). StuRat (talk) 18:35, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Add to what's been said that 2019 is a long way off in computer terms. Solid state drive prices are dropping and may (or may not) be at this price point in 5 years. Dismas|^(talk) 18:44, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

I'll play devil's advocate to the above answers. Unless EUR 40 causes you significant financial pain, it's cheap insurance - compare to paying another EUR 125 if you find yourself needing more space. And with my current six terabytes of network disk, I can't recall ever thinking "oh my, I have too much disk space, I wish I had less." 88.112.50.121 (talk) 21:02, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

If the difference in price isn't an issue, I'd say go with the larger, I'd imagine you could find some use for the extra space - looking at it realistically, a one time purchase for that small of an amount doesn't really matter, even in the worst case scenario that you never touch the other 2TB, does it actually matter? If we were talking a price difference of several hundred or a recurring fee, I think this would be worth considering, but for the amount involved, barring financial hardship, I'd go with the larger drive and not really worry about it.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 23:52, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

You already have 2 x 1TB USB drives? And now you want to buy either an additional 2TB disk or an additional 4TB disk? The way I see it, if you buy an additional 2TB, you will have 3 drives plugged in to the computer, the original 2 and this new 3rd one, is that right? If on the other hand you buy the big 4TB you can actually "get rid of" the existing 2 drives, right? IMHO, that sounds better. Copy everything from the 2x 1TB disks onto the 4TB and use them as an additional backup just for your most critical stuff or a permanent static backup with just what they have on them right now. Vespine (talk) 01:34, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I wouldn't buy either of them. First, if you have a desktop, you could just open the case and plug in a 4 TB HDD directly into the motherboard. A bare hard drive is a lot cheaper than an external USB drive. This one is only $145 (which is about 110 euros). In fact, you could get a 5 TB bare drive for the same price as the 4 TB external drive. Also, it's going to be much faster going through a SATA cable connected to your motherboard than through that USB 2.0 cable your Lacie drive uses. Or, if you don't have a desktop (or your motherboard doesn't have more than one SATA port), then you could just open the case of your Lacie drive and put a new 4 TB HDD in it. Here's how you can do that. Again, that'd be significantly cheaper. Now, going back to the original question, a 4 TB HDD is going to have higher read and write speeds than a 2 TB hard drive (assuming the drives are identical otherwise) because of the higher data density on the platters of the 4 TB HDD. Also, what if your camera breaks and you buy a new one with more megapixels? Now, your images are taking up more space and your old rate of drive exhaustion has changed. That's been the trend since the beginning with computer storage. I've been burned many times by making incremental upgrades in my hard drives only to need new ones a couple of years later. So, don't hold yourself back.—Best Dog Ever (talk) 05:15, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually it isn't true that external drives are always more expensive than internal drives. External drives are often cheaper than internal drives here in NZ when there are super specials at major retailers. From what I've read, this happens in the US as well and actually more often to the extent that people with large RAID arrays and even some with cloud storage often buy external HDDs and take out the internal disk.

(It was probably even more extreme during the massive price rises allegedly due to the flooding in Thailand, see e.g. [1]. Actually the flooding seem to be around the time this started in a major way in NZ. AFAIK it was very rare before then. Now that the price insanity has ended, it's started to get less common again. But still if you keep an eye out, you will often get an external drive for cheaper than you can get an internal one even at it's lowest comparitive price. Of course retailers here who actually sell OEM internal drives are tiny compared to those who deal with external ones.)

Also there's no reason to assume higher density platters on a 4TB HDD. Actually HDD platter density increases have slowed a lot recently. (Shingled Magnetic Recording may have helped, but this tech doesn't seem ready for consumer drives due to the limitations, and may never be. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is a better bet for consumer drives but still seems a while away).)

Seagate has has 1TB 3.5" platters for ~3 years now, and by now it seems the vast majority of their main consumer line 3.5" drives use these. In fact in the case of Seagate for their main consumer line drives, their 1-3TB drives are usually 7200RPM after they abandoned the green line concept, but their 4TB drives are slower 5900RPM so their 4TB drives are in fact often slower than their 2TB ones.

Western Digital seem a bit more variable, but still by now I believe the majority of their main line consumer drives (green) tend to be 1TB platter drives. In the case of WD, since their 2TB and 4TB main line consumer drives are generally the same speed (5400RPM), you probably have a lower risk by buying a 4TB drive of getting a slow one since although WD has produced 4TB drives with smaller platters, this has only happened with their fancier drives AFAIK. (While this holds true to Seagate, I believe it's fairly rare to get a non 1TB platter drive even in 2TB now. And more importantly, the rotational speed difference makes platter density speed differential more complicated.)

Of course, if you're only worried about speed and purchase price, you're probably better sticking with Seagate for a 2TB anyway given the rotational speed difference, unless you're looking at the fancier WD lines. (And actually if you are worried about speed and have no problems using 2 drives, a 2x2TB Seagate would be a better bet than a 4TB.)

Note that even with internal drives where you can see the model code etc, it's not always easy to tell how many platters the drive uses since manufacturers no longer generally advertise it, at least for their main line drives. See e.g. [2] [3]. Sometimes weight or testing the drive might be your only bet (whether you can do this before purchase or be able to return the drive after purchase will of course vary).

There is an added complexity if buying external drives since you can't even see the internal drive model codes. You may be able to convince the drive to give up the internal drives serial number and model code in some cases with the right software. If not and you're using USB3 (or eSATA or anything else fast enough), you can come to a fair conclusion by testing the drive, although plenty of vendors won't allow free returns for an opened drive without fault or similar. So unless you were advertised something this only really helps if you are planning to buy a lot. (Weighing the drive problematic since there's a risk of different casing and conversion components. You can open the drive, but this will normally void the warranty and even if you're thinking of doing this sneakily, it often isn't easy to open the drive without damaging the casing if you don't have experience.) Still most of the cheapest external drives tend to use the main consumer drives. However there have been cases when people have found fancier drives inside and it gets more complicated with the higher end external drives.

OTOH, you should consider if you really need the maximum possible speed for backup drives, or whether other factors (or just ignoring speeds) is a better bet if you have resonable speeds. I do agree if the OP is considering a USB2 drive (which is a little too slow) vs an internal, they really should consider if the internal is a possibility. (USB3 vs SATA often won't have a significant speed difference except in special cases so other factors are much more in play.)

P.S. I don't see it useful to compare US prices to the OPs local prices. For starters many EU locations are very strict about VAT, so even if the OP wanted to import directly they would need to pay VAT if Amazon doesn't pay it for them. More importantly, while some electronics may be worth risking shipping internationally, this probably isn't a good idea for HDs where there's a strong risk of warranty issues, particularly after such long shipping.

P.P.S. I don't know if your internal drive was the cheapest you found, but a quick search on Amazon found this 4TB external [4] for $137.99 i.e. less than the $146.85 for the internal you linked to. I did a quick search and couldn't find any cheaper internal 4TBs on Amazon [5] but I don't know if Amazon is the best place to search and don't use it enough to know if I was doing it right.

Nil Einne (talk) 07:57, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

The thing is, my internal hard drive is 2 TB, and is only in danger of running out of space in early 2019. My USB hard drives, on the other hand, are only 1 TB each, and will probably run out of space before next winter. So I'm in no hurry of upgrading the internal drive. And my current computer (which my company gave to me to be able to work from home if necessary) only has two hard drive bays, and both are in use. One has a 1 TB drive with Windows 8 for work use, the other has a 2 TB drive with Fedora 20 Linux for free-time use. I will have to replace the Linux hard drive eventually, but that's a long time coming, and I'd rather avoid the hassle until it's necessary. And the computer magazines I mentioned never said "buy the most expensive hard drive you can afford". They said "buy the biggest hard drive you can afford". The reasoning was that no matter how big the drive, it's going to run out of space eventually, and you want to postpone that as much as possible, because upgrading a hard drive is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult if you are a novice to computer hardware. JIP | Talk 18:42, 25 August 2014 (UTC)