Having purchased a 2TB Seagate Expansion Desktop Hard Drive recently, I was oddly excited at the thought of creating Clonezilla images of my machines and backing up my legally downloaded (cough) multimedia files. Ordering HDTVs and nice hybrid laptops are well and good, but there's nothing like the freedom of having plenty of storage to work with especially when you don't own a desktop or manage your own server.
A Bundle of Joy
When buying an external portable or desktop hard drive, one of the more overlooked aspects is the bundled software. Western Digital products, for example, price their products based not only on the storage size, but whether their proprietary WD SmartWare is included. Likewise, the Seagate Backup Plus series includes Seagate's (of course) Backup Plus software. On the other hand,
I like the bundled software that comes with external hard drives. I don't really use the software since my machines run on Linux (the bundled software is primarily for MacOSX and Windows users). However, I like testing them out in a sandboxed system or from within VirtualBox. Toshiba's NTI Backup Now EZ utility was especially well-designed. BuffaloTools, on the other hand, included a RAM optimizer and a script to "accelerate" USB data transfer. Although Buffalo's bundled applications (TurboPC, TurboCopy, Backup Utility, RAMDisk Utility) seemed simplistic and would appear like crapware to most users, I actually appreciated their efforts (though the design of the toolbar looked decidedly 90s compared to today's apps). Moreover, including the utilities didn't add anything to the price unlike Western Digital and Seagate products.
In general, external drives with bundled software will include the following utilities:
- File/folder backup software
- Scheduled backup manager
- Encryption software
- System or imaging software (which creates incremental or a single backup of the whole OS)
- Disk format utility for MacOSX and Windows
- Link or launcher to register the storage drive
Advanced and Linux users don't really need any of those utilities, but casual users should explore and try these applications. Backing up data is a pretty important task in this digital world we live in. If you're not interested in backup software (and want to avoid the premium), go for basic external drives like WD Elements and the aforementioned Seagate Expansion drive. They're just good old empty drives for use and are often cheaper than those that don't include the bundled software.
File Format
The first thing I did after buying the Seagate was plug the drive into my Linux machine and check the drive's file format. This is especially important because some drives like the Buffalo Drivestation are shipped with the legacy file format FAT32. This isn't really a big deal . . . unless of course, you're trying to transfer a 4.9GB Blu-ray rip of Captain America: The First Avenger. FAT32 doesn't support large file transfer so you'll actually get an error message if you try to copy a file larger than 4.xGB. Why do some manufacturers ship the drive formatted as FAT32? So you can plug the drive to both a Mac and PC. This is also the reason why the Buffalo and Toshiba drives came with a utility to format the drive to either Windows' NTFS, FAT32, or Mac's HFS+.
One of the features of Linux that always warms my heart is its ability to support every disk format out there, from legacy file systems such as FAT32 to Windows' NTFS to Apple's HFS+ and to more advanced file partition tables such as Btrfs.
To check your drive's file format in openSUSE KDE:
- Click ALT+F2 and type Partitioner.
- Enter your user password and click Yes when prompted.
- In the Partitioner window, click Hard disks on the System View panel.
- Look for the Seagate drive on your list of hard drives. The FS Type column indicates your hard drive's file system.
To check your drive's file format in Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8:
- Click Windows+R.
- In the Run window, type diskmgmt.msc
- In the Disk management window, look for the Seagate drive and check the File System column.
Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions like Linux Mint come with the extremely popular Gparted disk utility. MacOSX also has a Disk Utility for formatting and managing external drives.
The Seagate Expansion drive I bought came with NTFS so I really didn't need to format it since the drive will be used on my Linux and Windows machines. Now, one word of caution. Although Linux has excellent disk utilities for formatting your Buffalo, Toshiba, Western Digital, or Seagate drives to NTFS, I highly recommend using either Windows Disk Management or the manufacturer's bundled utility instead. Windows 7 and even Windows XP might actually have issues reading external drives formatted in NTFS using Linux disk utilities such as Gparted and Partitioner. As much as I love Linux, better safe than sorry.
On an unrelated note, if you're primarily using Linux at home or in your workplace, try formatting your drive using Btrfs - you might actually find it worth your while.
External Desktop Hard Drives, Backup Software, and Linux Part 2: Drive Diagnostics and Linux backup utilities
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