Keeping Your Backups Green
This weekend I went to Fry’s Electronics to purchase a new external backup hard drive. The one I have been using for backup is a 500 GB drive that’s is almost full. I plan to store it in a safe location and put a new drive into service. For the new drive, I wanted something larger, preferably 1 TB.
Anyone who’s been to one of the Fry’s Electronics locations on the west coast knows that Fry’s has lots of choices when it comes to external hard drives. But it didn’t take me long to find a perfect drive for what I wanted. It was the 1 TB Simple Tech [re}drive, shown below.
1 TB [re}drive by Hitachi.
The outer case is completely recycleable.
This drive is a new drive from Hitachi. It’s called the [re]drive because it’s designed to have a low impact on the environment. The case is made of aluminum (30% recycled) and bamboo, both of which are easy to recycle. To see a full list of the environmental impact of this drive, click here. Additionally, the drive is designed to use much less electricity than comparable drives, which means that it also saves you money. The best part about this drive is that it was only $99.99.
Whether you’re into helping the planet by being green, or helping the green in your wallet, you’ll like this drive. You’ll especially like it if you’re using a Mac because its aluminum case fits the visual design of most Macs. If you use it with a PC, you’ll like the fact that it’s formatted and ready to go with award winning Fabrik Backup software preloaded onto it.
Mac Installation Note
When I plugged this drive into my Mac G5 it was necessary to prepare it for use on a Mac by erasing it, which is fairly straightforward. The software guide that comes on the drive explains how to do this using the Disk Utility program (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility). When I chose Erase I got an error that said, “The drive could not be unmounted”. After a bit of Googling I found out that all I needed to do was eject the drive by dragging it to the trash, leave it plugged in and powered up, and then choose Erase again. It worked like a charm.
BTW - my wife, who owns a small accounting firm (juliafitzgeraldcpa.com) was also in the market for some new backup drives. She bought two of them. 
Wow, a tera-byte, that’s a lot of data. You must have a ton of PSD files to backup. On my Vista laptop I’m backing up everything to an external drive except image files because I burn those to a DVD after each photo session.
My back-up drive is only 60GB and it still has space after 1 year of use…
Yikes, not only inexpensive for a TB but also really good looking. Nice solution.
Hi Daniel -
I use an internal 500GB drive for storing all of my 35,000+ photos. That’s because I want all of these photos to be in my Lightroom catalog and I want to be able to access them at any time. This gives me a huge amount of power over my library because I can use a keyword to find any photo when I need it.
I also back up important photos to plastic discs. However, I don’t ever want to have to rebuild my photo storage drive by loading a few hundred discs. I’d rather use a $99 drive that contains them all. The plastic discs are only for a worst case scenario.
Thanks for your comment.
Mark