Care & Feeding of External Hard Drives

[Palanan]

I have two external drives from Toshiba that I've used for backup and photo storage for the past couple of years. I really, really like these drives, but I have a couple major worries about them:

1. I usually back up recent photos every two or three days, and I do this by manually connecting the USB cable to first one external drive and then the other. This is a lot of plugging and unplugging, and over the past few months I've had some hiccups and error messages. Am I hastening their demise with this approach? Is there a better way to do this?

2. I'm planning to get a new laptop soon, and for a variety of reasons I'm thinking of going with Ubuntu, which I've used before. My worry here is that the hard drives are NTFS for WinXP, and I'm not sure if they'll interface with an Ubuntu system or die on contact. (I had a previous external HD go the latter route several years ago, so I'm not eager to experiment.)

I'm especially worried about the second item, since I need to get the new laptop, but I also need it to work with the external hard drives. I've been able to transfer USB thumbdrives between Mac, Windows and Ubuntu computers with no fuss or trouble, but I don't know if that will apply to my external drives.

I'm sure these are very naive questions, so all constructive advice is very welcome.

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[Mando Knight]

New Linux machines should have the ability to read NTFS-formatted hard drives.

When you're switching drives, are you waiting for them to finish working before unplugging them? The "Safely Eject Hardware" function in Windows is meant for this purpose, but if the drive is inactive, you can generally skip that step without worrying. I wouldn't try repeatedly plugging and unplugging the hard drives, though. That seems a bit excessive.

[factotum]

I agree. Get yourself a £20 powered USB hub (heck, if the drives have their own power supply you might even get away with an unpowered one) if you don't have enough USB ports to have both drives connected at the same time. If you're unplugging them so you can move your backups somewhere different from your main machine then that's another issue entirely; not sure what the best solution would be in that case, other than to always properly disconnect the drives in Windows (or Ubuntu, when you get it) before physically unplugging it.

[Grinner]

I have an old laptop with an outdated copy of Fedora on it. It handles my external hard drive perfectly.