Ben's Bargains

[MaJoad52]

I've just been learning about external hard drives from reading Ben's deals and the comments they provoke.

It sounds like two of the basic problems leading to hard drive failure are the spinning the drive needs to do to function and the heat that this creates in the enclosure. Those who comment seem to agree that no matter what brand, hard drives ultimately fail, either sooner or later, and it is vital to the safety of one's data to provide for this eventuality by creating multiple back-ups.

Would you say that this is accurate, so far?

If you were starting from square one to back up the hard drive on a new computer (PC or Mac) and guard against the loss of data that failure of one or more of the drives would cause, what would you do?

Do you think that flash memory devices will ever compete with high capacity traditional hard drives (ITB for example) for backing up entire computer hard drive contents? Or for use as external storage for large numbers of photo files? The reason I ask is that it seems that flash memory has the advantage of no moving parts to fail. In several discussions it seemed that the effective storage time of data saved to flash memory is almost limitless. Is that correct? Am I overlooking something here?

Are there other issues to be considered if traditional hard drives and flash memory devices are compared? Automatic backup, upload time, download time, writing to memory, cost, special storage conditions, etc.

Where can I find explanations of the terms used to describe various features of hard drives? USB USB 2.0 eSATA firewire cache size and so forth.

Could someone offer some enlightenment here?

[milf_hunter]

Is it okay to drink milk after the expiration date? If so, how long do you have? Also, how do you make hard-boiled eggs so that the shells don't stick to the egg?