Can Someone Hack My External Back Up Drive?

A Big and Flexible External Drive

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Product:	Maxtor 5000DV
Web Site:	www.maxtor.com
Pro:	Huge capacity, quiet, performs well
Con:	Pricey; no "off" switch
Summary:	An excellent secondary backup device for small networks or a small office environment with both USB 2.0 and FireWire connectivity supported.
Score:
Price:	$399, check prices

Backing up your system seems to get harder every year. Years ago, you had the choice of backing up to floppy or to tape drive. But even a small hard drive took dozens of floppies, and low-cost, PC tape drives were less than reliable. Then, Iomega's Zip drives came on the scene, but just as they became common, hard drive space began to explode. As tape drives became more reliable with continuously increasing capacities, even they couldn't keep pace with the burgeoning size of capacious IDE drives — at least, not desktop tape units. Then, CD-RW dropped in price, but 650-700MB just doesn't seem to cut it anymore either.

As hard drives climbed towards 80GB, DVD recorders appeared on the scene, but media was initially expensive. And even the 4.7GB capacity of a DVD disc seems anemic next to the latest 200GB monster drives. So what do you use to back up a big drive?

Another big hard drive, of course.

It's cost prohibitive for most users to plop in a second large drive into their systems. But an external drive that can support a small workgroup, or a group of neighbors, might be an ideal solution. We wrote about this idea recently in our story on building your own USB external drive a few weeks ago. At that time, we discovered that the Belkin enclosure we used wouldn't support 48-bit LBA (logical block addressing) in its IDE-to-USB bridge chip, which limited the enclosure to drives smaller than 137GB. (Since then, Belkin is looking at updating the bridge chip, but hasn't given any specifics as to when a new version would be announced).

Stepping into the gap are several companies with off-the-shelf external drives, including Maxtor. Here, we take a look at the Maxtor 5000DV, which sports a 200GB, 7200RPM drive in an enclosure that supports both USB 2.0 and IEEE1394 (FireWire). This 5000DV uses the same Maxtor DiamondMax 9 we reviewed back in early December – which can be had now for well under $300 (check prices). The drive mechanism includes a full 8MB of cache as well. At roughly $370, the external drive's not cheap, but has some premium features that may make it attractive for small office environments.

Maxtor includes Dantz Software's Retrospect backup utility, which mitigates the cost somewhat. This is the "light" version, which only works with the Maxtor drive, but is easy to use.

Maxtor adds a button on the front of the drive that makes it easy to backup your system. After installing the included driver, simply pressing that button launches Retrospect and automatically runs a backup script. It's a slick solution to the perennial issue of overcoming your own personal inertia in order to back up your data. Both Retrospect and the custom Maxtor driver support most flavors of Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

Note that Retrospect defaults to a "file copy" mode that simply replicates the chosen directory structure, with no data compression. Alternatively, you can configure the software to back the data up into one big file, with data compression enabled. That will allow you to store substantially more than 200GB of data on the DV5000.

We put the drive through an extensive set of testing. You can evaluate our testbed on the next page, evaluate our test results starting with Winbench 99, or simply jump to our conclusions for our final word on the 5000 DV.

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Can Someone Hack My External Back Up Drive?

Source: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/53390-a-big-and-flexible-external-drive

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