Which drive WD 20EARS or Samsung F4EG

[m4rky]

I have a Windows Home Server that I want to backup to an external HDD.

I have decided that I want a Sharkoon DriveLink USB. I can then plug this into my WHS and back up the data. It will also be useful with other drives I have lying around.

I also need a new 2TB SATA drive:
Which one of these provides the most compatibility with Win7, WHS and XP?
Will they both work with the sharkoon DriveLink?

WD 20EARS
Samsung F4EG

[peterb]

Both good drives AFAIK - at least both from good mfrs. As for compatability, yes they should, but you need to ask that question of Scan (and preferably get an answer in writing) so if for any reason it doesn't work, you can go back to them on the grounds that it wasn't fit for purpose after they said it was. (Their liability).

How do you intend to back up? You can either create an NTFS file system on the external drive and copy files across or you could clone the entire WHS hard drive so that it could (in heory) be a direct plug'n'play replacement for th hard drive in the whs. Either strategy is acceptable. The first will probably be quicker, the second would beslower, but get you up and running uicker when he whs drive fails (but you should test that it really is p'n'p first.)

Watch out for little 'gotchas' like sector size. Some new advance format WD drives have 4096B sectors, rather than 512, which isn't a problem with Win7 and other OS's that are aware of them, and won't matter if you are backing up files, but could potentially cause a problem cloning a disk (or swapping it back in, which is why you need to verify your backup) If the drive you are cloning from as advanced formatting, then it won't be a problem - but you still need to test it!

[kingpotnoodle]

The EARS drives uses 4k sectors, in theory better so long as you stick to recent (i.e Windows 7, 2k8r2 based or better) OS. They can be set for 512K sectors but IIRC it kills performance.

In practice the speed difference is probably minimal, especially for sequential transfers to external storage.

[Hawker1986]

Ive got 6 EARS drives in my WHS 2011 box and one was previously in my WHSv1. Never had any problems with them, they run cool and very quiet. I heard the samsung drives had some problems with data loss, but that was a while ago and presumably has now been fixed. I still decided to avoid them for that reason though.

Hawker

[m4rky]

Thanks for the replies.

Scan confimed that either drive should be ok but recommended the WD drive as it has a bigger cache.

I have always had WD drives so will go with those.