I believe many external enclosures do not provide sufficient cooling. The only real drive failures I've ever had have been external ones in enclosures.
Personally, now when I need more storage, I just add more internal storage, or replace the internal drive with a larger drive.
I use external docks now and buy bare hard drives, and use them in the dock for backup. I just recently bought a two bay dock so I could use two drives at once without having two docks on my desk. That's helpful when you want to use an older smaller drive (spare) and overflow it (especially if you use backup software like Macrium which can span drives).
I have about 11 TB internal...and now I buy 4TB drives as backup devices...about $120 each for WD Green (they don't need to be real fast for backup). I take four of them with my data and put them offsite.
You could also just use the docks to add storage. Though if you were using them heavily, there's no fan, and although they are bare to the room environment, that's totally passive cooling and may not be enough. But you might consider upgrading your internal storage and then using the docks with the old drives as backup drives.
Lastly, if you have a very fast connection to the internet, you could use one of the backup plans like Carbonite, Backblaze, or Crashplan. Here's an article reviewing them: //pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/tp/online_backup_services.htm
The great thing about the online backups is they are continuous and automatically offsite...they work in the bg and upload new files (once you are up to date online, which can take a VERY LONG time if you have terabytes of data to upload.
Message edited by author 2015-01-05 23:05:29. |
