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Buying a Removable Drive


Storage
Harddiscs (IDE)
Harddiscs (SCSI)
Removable drives
CDRW Buying Guide

Buying a Removable Drive?

Backup?
Most Windows 95/98 users are guilty of not backing up their harddisks and important files. It is true that modern harddisks are very reliable, but the day your harddisk gives up the ghost can be catastrophic. We advise all users to back up their important files regularly in one way or another - even if you just copy your most vital files onto a floppy disk! If you have a network of two or more computers in a network, backup is simplicity itself - just copy your most important files onto a seperate directory on the other machine. Of course, if you are serious about your files, you should make backups to more durable media as well.

What kind of backup drive?
There are many types of backup drives and devices. For small amounts of data, using a Zip-drive (which stores 100MB per disk) is a fairly good solution, although its cost pr megabyte of storage is rather high. Jaz-drives can store 2GB on a single disk and this is particularly useful if you need to share large amounts of information with other people.

For the home user, however, our recommendation is to purchase a CD-writer (aka CD burner, CDR, CDRW or CD rewritable drive). These can store 650MB of data on a single CD that costs around £1. That's a huge amount of storage for a very low price. And of course, CD-writers have other uses, such as making your own music compilations. All in all, we feel this provides the best value solution for small-scale backup. Read more about CD-writers on the CDRW Buying Guide Page.

The final solution is a tape drive. These use digital magnetic tapes to store data. Their big advantages are the large amounts of data they can store (up to 8 Gigabytes per tape) and the relatively low cost per megabyte. They are however rather slow and are best left running overnight.

In the future (just around the corner) we can expect to see DVD-RAM drives taking a big bite into the backup market. These can store up to 5,2 Gigabytes on a single disc and are much faster than tape drives. Alas there is still some confusion about standards, so our advice is to employ a wait-and-see policy with regards to purchasing DVD-RAM drives.

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