Backing up my hard drive

[Delengowski]

I have a Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB, now every once in a while during boot that sucker will get really effin loud and it sounds like its spinning fast. Luckily I don't have a ton of precious data on there, I mean there are pictures but not a crap load that I can't put on my old 500gb WD black.

I'm thinking of buying another Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB and mirroring them in RAID 1; because I do want to start puting more media on my current drive. My question is would that be more cost-efficient or would it be more cost-efficient to make images of all the data I really care about and just burn them to re writable bluray disks, and just copy over when need be?

Thanks in ahead


Edit: It should be noted that I boot from a Samsung 830 256gb SSD; so I'd like to back that up too but its not at the top of my list(I don't even use 70gbs of it..mainly because I don't game anymore and deleted them all)

 

[phil22]

Are you sure the loud noise is coming from the hard drive and not from the PSU fan or some other cooling fan?

You can test the hard drive with the manufacturer's own diagnostic software to establish whether or not there's anything wrong with it. Download and install Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows here:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en

There's a "short" and "long" test (may be called "extended" I can't recall). Use the long test to be really sure there's nothing wrong with the drive.

For backing up your data I would not create backup images. Just copy the data to a pair of external hard drives so the files can be retrieved easily without need for using proprietary recovery software. You can write the data to blu-ray if you'd prefer, but my own preference is to use external hard drives (four of them, in fact, so I have three backups if one should fail.

Creating a partition-image is something I do only to back up my OS drive.

 

[str8cuse]

Have you considered using a cloud service for your backup needs? From the sound of it you do not have a lot of data you want to back up. I would recommend using google drive or skydrive as they are free services and give you a great backup option.