XYMer's Home away from Home

Costco has the Seagate Backup Plus 4TB USB3 external HD on sale for $159, $20 off the $179 price they normally charge. This makes this drive a huge deal right now, especially if you intend to use it as an internal or in a non-USB3 dock/enclosure like I did (you have to disassemble the enclosure it comes in, but worth it to avoid USB3 wifi issues, as well as being able to use it on SATA3 ports).

I'm getting two of these, admittedly for a very odd purpose. You see, I like watching my DVDs. A lot. I watch things more than once, so I'm putting all of them onto these drives so I never have to dig for them again. That and they act as a backup in case something does happen to my discs.

These units use the Barracuda XT drive line, and are perfectly suitable for backup purposes.

Get'em while they're hot.

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Is that a single 4TB mechanism, or two 2 TB drives in the same case?

- Anonymous

It's a single drive.

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I do the same thing for all my DVDs, except I convert them into h.264 videos using quality settings that make them still look great on 50" screens. 2TB goes a long way when a single movie is 1-1.5GB.

I did some reading on 4TB HDs recently, though, and if you buy one of these I would definitely buy a 2nd one and use it to maintain a backup, preferably of the offline variety (meaning you keep it turned off most of the time). There's a lot of people finding a lot of bad sectors, with more developing over time. A couple people reported nearly 1TB being unreadable after 3 months.

It's only been the last six or eight months that I'm willing to cautiously turn my back on 2 TB drives without assuming they're going to viciously lunge at me. For the time being, I'm pretty sure 4 TB drives are made from nitroglycerine and Play-Doh*.

- Anonymous

* A fun combination for sure, but not necessarily an ideal one for casual use as a data storage medium.

The drive will act as an offline backup. When I want to watch any specific DVD, I simply copy it over to my internal 1 TB HD at SATA3 speeds and watch it from there.

One thing to note: These Barracuda XT drives get hot, even in an open air HD dock. I can't imagine them being very comfy inside the enclosure they come packaged in (so glad I took that apart to get to the drive itself).

The drive's being held in a Zippo 3.5" HD case for protection when not in use.

I've got a lot of DVDs, being that most of my purchases are full series box sets.

Babylon 5
Babylon 5 Movie Collection
He-Man (1980s)
She-Ra (1980s)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Enterprise
Star Trek: The Next Generation (also Blu-Ray S1, S2)
V: The Original Miniseries (1984)
V: The Final Battle (1984)
V: The Series (1984)
Transformers Generation 1 Collection (1984-1992)
Transformers: The Movie
Transformers: Beast Wars
Knight Rider (1984)
Buck Rogers
Battlestar Galctica (1978)
Galactica 1980
Robotech: The Macross Saga
Robotech: The Robotech Masters
Robotech: The New Generation
Voltron: Blue Lion
Volcano
10.5
Category 6: Day of Destruction
Sailor Moon S Geneon Collection
Sailor Moon Super S Geneon Collection
Sailor Moon: The Movies (R, S, Super S)
Emergency! (S1-S7)
The Core
Battleship
Third Watch (S1)
Thundercats (S1-S2)
I, Robot
Inspectof Gadget S1 (1984)

And probably a few more I can't remember off the top of my head. And I absolutely freaking hate double sided DVDs like the BSG 1978 series is - they scratch so goddamned easily (hence why I'm backing them up). And curses to whoever mastered V and V: The Series in Dolby Digital MONO that uses only the center channel speaker (WTF?) forcing me to force Stereo mode. Grr...

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Heh, I did the same thing not long ago. Grabbed a 3TB at Costco for $129 and ripped my entire collection to it with MakeMKV, so everything is pretty well ripped verbatim from the DVD with no additional compression. I've ripped close to 200 DVDs and about a dozen BluRays and I haven't even eaten 2TB. I did it partially because I don't want to rummage through DVDs, but also because I want to be able to re-encode select movies for my phone or even old iPod. I don't want to bother with H.264 when Apple and my iPhone will likely support the glory of H.265 by the middle of the year.

Seagate killed off Samsung's HD204UI so I can't get any more of my favorite 2TB model. Damn things are real troopers...

I've had good luck with the Western Digital Green 2 TB drives. They've been chugging along in my grandparents' DVRs for a year now without so much as a hiccup running 24/7. Not bad for a non-enterprise drive. Hopefully by the time the drives do start showing failure symptoms, DirecTV will have a transfer wizard to allow new drives to have copied info on them so long as they're used with the same DVR. My grandparents' fourth DVR just got a WD 2 TB Red (NAS) drive since it cost less and has a better warranty than the Green drives, yet is designed for constant uptime. We'll see how that one goes.

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Can anyone here confirm that these drives are native SATA inside the enclosure? I recall both Seagate and Western Digital both using proprietary connectors insides their external enclosures to prevent users from buying them in bulk and then using them as internals.

They're native SATA. I am using my 4 TB Barracuda XT from within the enclosure in my BlacX duet dock. If you take apart the enclosure, you'll find that the bottom piece is an SATA connector plane into a USB3 bridge, so if you put the enclosure back together with any other HD inside it still works.

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I tend to crack open a lot of drives and it's been a while since I've cracked one open and found anything besides a PATA or SATA drive inside.

Not saying they have never resorted to it, but PATA/SATA bridge boards are cheap and PATA/SATA controllers are cheap, so designing a one-off controller for each and every drive that also has a normal PATA/SATA controller... seems like it'd raise, not lower, costs. Given that profits on drives are returning to normal levels, I would hope that has been consigned to the dustbin of history again as a practice too expensive to do on a regular basis.