Sanho Hyperdrive Colorspace - Ultimate backup?

[Paul Grecian]

I've been considering a hard drive backup specifically for my most important images. It would be nice to know that what they were backed up onto received them correctly and that the harddrive was operating correctly. In reading about the Sanho HyperDrive Colorspace UDMA on the B&H site it says this -

Inside the HyperDrive, S.M.A.R.T. constantly monitors the hard drive's status for potential issues. A built-in data recovery tool can be employed to recover formatted, deleted, lost, or corrupted files from most memory cards. The integrity of each data-backup is checked by the CRC copy-verification system, and Data-Synchronization allows the HyperDrive to mirror its contents onto another HyperDrive or an external hard drive via USB OTG host technology. Incremental Backup allows the transfer of new images, while skipping over all of the previously saved data.

Is this worth doing for quite a bit more than a regular hard drive or is it overkill for that purpose?

Thanks.

[Stephen]

All hard drives should be expected to fail at some point in time. So if your main purpose is long term storage you might be better served with multiple copies of more simple, less expensive, reliable drives such as Western Digital. What the Hyperdrive UDMA excels at is very fast backup (of UDMA cards)in the field with a visual check of your images. The drives in this device are replaceable and user selectable up to 500GB capacity. Their reliability will be determined by the particular drive installed and user smarts. One failing of this device is the sparse content and poor quality of the manual.

[E.J. Peiker]

If you really want one of these that is super reliable, stick an SSD in it instead of a hard drive. Expensive, yes but almost indestructible.

[GeneO]

For long term storage of long term data, some kind of checksum is needed to detect silent data corruption - data corruption that can occur without the disk drive or OS becaoming aware of it. It sounds like the data recovery is only for the cards. While the check-summing is nice, you don't need a hyperdrive to do that or monitor SMART statistics. You are paying a large premium per GB for the card reader, portability and features on the Sanho. If those aren't needed and you just need a backup device for your desktop, I would go for a couple of external hard drives.

As Stephan says, you can manage multiple of your own. The is a nice free CRC generating/checking tool: CDCHECK. Though it was targeted for CD it works on any disk. Just run it over a folder with your images in it and it creates a checksum. You can then run it on the folder, and if any files contents have changed it will detect it.: http://kvipu.com/CDCheck/

Gene

[Paul Grecian]

Thanks all, and also for that link Gene.