about best hard drive practices for a standard user.

I received a question from one of my friends about how to keep his data and hard drive properly. well.. this is my advice, which by no means is a full answered question, feel free to shoot suggestions or improvements for this post. thank you.

about best practices,...

I'm gonna tell you what I do and why: I don't keep a external hard drive connected at all times, only to move files back and forth, the reason is , what the manufacturer doesn't tell you is the hard drive becomes too hot internally and is designed to shorten the drive life that way, you having a eternal external drive is not a good business for them.

another one, some people call external cases "hard drive toasters" if you really work on the files in there and they are big enough and constantly accessed, again, the temperature plays a big role in their life span.

what I use is externals for temporary storage, depending how big is your daily data flow a flash drive 16 or 32gb may suit you better. also the spinning plates in a hard drive make them a victim of the gyroscopicforces involved when you move the drive and it is still spinning, not sure if you noticed that. they are not inherently designed for that job. I wait at least 30 seconds before moving a external after disconnection, proper disconnection, as in clicking "eject" you know the drill.

what would suit you better if you're a road warrior (not the cheapest option, though) is a external case with a SSD inside, then you have no moving parts and a lot less energy consumption ,ergo , less heat.

also if you always have internet access everywhere you go a couple of online tools can keep your data at hand, like dropbox or any other similar service.

for backups, you have paid an free options, dropbox again can be one and also crash plan, google for it. they have a free version, unlimited size, for what I read, if you base the backup in your own computer or a friend's computer. also I have a software called cobian backup running in my computer as a service backing up all my data to a slow but reliable NAS drive an Dlink dns321 two bay network drive modified for cooling purposes, connected to my router. which is mirroring the info in its two drives, so I can handle up to three drives failure and still be safe. i.e my computer my laptop and my external drive can all crash and I still have a *kinda of up to date* copy of my data set, anyway, it may be a little overkill but it works for me.

on the other side, some good external cases do have a nice fan, but in my experience, due to money spending constraints, I always feel like it is not enough, and also if I push the drive to full activity (something the design engineers seem to think the user never does) for a extended period of time, the cooling solution always fail. IMHO.