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What kind of USB hard drive can I use?

Overview

If you are backing up a large amount of data you may consider performing the initial backup to a portable USB disk, which can be mailed to us and loaded onto our server. If you are interested in using this service, please contact us for pricing and arrangements.

Details

The USB hard disk enclosure that you use must be compatible with our Linux Server (which runs SuSE Linux 9.3). To ensure that your initial backup is fast, you should use an enclosure that is USB 2.0 compatible.

We recommend the AMS Venus DS3 (DS-2316B2BK) hard disk enclosure. It's made of aluminum, has a built in fan, and is USB 2.0 compatible. It's compatible with 3.5" IDE (parallel ATA) hard drives (note that it does not support SATA drives). You can read reviews and buy it for around $35 from newegg.com by following this link.

Next, you need to buy a large, cheap parallel ATA IDE hard disk to put into the enclosure. Here are some pricewatch.com links:

• pricewatch.com hard drives home page: follow the links for eide drives
• EIDE 250GB: $65
• EIDE 320GB: $100
• EIDE 400GB: $170
• EIDE 500GB: $230
• EIDE 750GB: $415

You must buy a drive large enough to contain all of the data for an account. We do not support loading the data for one account across multiple drives at this time. If you have more than 750GB of data to load, you should use sub-accounts and use separate disks for each sub-account. If this does not work for you, please contact us for additional solutions