External HD Newb question

[fd3]

Looking for a backup of the laptop.  1TB would be plenty, but I am confused as to Amazon offering me pro installation as I assumed it would be plug and play (the last one I had was).  Also, is SSD less likely to break than a disk? (My last external drive broke you see...)

[Kim]

Presumably "Pro installation" in this context means you pay an extortionate rate for someone to set up some proprietary backup software.

I think SSDs are generally more reliable, yes.  Particularly if they're going to be subjected to mechanical abuse.  Everything can fail, of course.

[perpetual dan]

It could be that pro installation is a blanket offer on all computer hardware - with no judgement about the complexity of the task made.

I seem to remember seeing it offered on some RAM recently, but I can see why not everyone would be comfortable with diy for that.

[grams]

Both types of drive can decide they don’t want to work anymore. Hard drives usually give you at least a short warning where they run slowly or noisily, whereas SSDs just suddenly become completely unresponsive and that’s that.

[nuttycyclist]

Check the filesystem and supported formats.

All my external drives were USB and I could just copy files onto them.  I didn't use the software required as I saw no need to install it.  Plugging in the drive enabled the computer to see it.

However, I wasn't able to back up virtual images as the files were too large (on one drive) and on another one I tried I found that several of the files I was copying over refused as the filenames weren't compatible.


Last time I upgraded the laptop (needed larger drive, and wanted a fresh OS install without risking existing data) I just bought a new SSD and an external drive caddy.    New SSD went in laptop, new OS installed, old HDD went in caddy and data copied back. 

[Kim]

Shirley the filesystem is whatever you format it with?  Probably defaults to something FAT32ish for compatibility, but there's no reason you have to keep it that way.

[nuttycyclist]

I didn't want to reformat it, as it already had my wife's data on it.

[Kim]

I didn't want to reformat it, as it already had my wife's data on it.

Lack of planning is hardly the disk's fault.  Choosing the right filesystem for the data you're going to store is computer user 101 stuff, and we all get it wrong by failing to anticipate what sort of data we'll be dealing with in future / what the future OS will support / whether it was written by a murderer / etc.

[Mr Larrington]

Shirley the filesystem is whatever you format it with?  Probably defaults to something FAT32ish for compatibility, but there's no reason you have to keep it that way.

Car stereos normally speak FAT32, which has a nominal maximum drive size of 32GB, at least under Windows.  Fortunately there are ways round this.

[lissotriton]

If you are just using Windows, NTFS is probably a better option than FAT32.
FAT32 has a max file size of 4GB, could be annoying for large videos or disk images etc. Also NTFS has proper support for security and file permissions, and unicode file names etc. NTFS is probably faster and more reliable for large drives.

[DaveJ]

FAT32 and ExFAT won't get the best performance out of an SSD.

[Afasoas]

Looking for a backup of the laptop.  1TB would be plenty, but I am confused as to Amazon offering me pro installation as I assumed it would be plug and play (the last one I had was).  Also, is SSD less likely to break than a disk? (My last external drive broke you see...)

I wonder if a USB DAS (direct attached storage) that supports RAID1 (two disks, mirrored) is a good option for someone wanting to simply backup data from a single machine?

e.g. https://www.scan.co.uk/products/raidon-gr3660-b3-raid-subsystem-for-2-x-35-sata-hdd-raid-0-1-and-jbod-usb-30-host-uasp-sata

[aidan.f]

I think that's £79 for just the case, no disks. If you can connect a Nas to your LAN sitting somewhere secure  better IMO. It's just 'there'.  The usb array seems to be a good way to drop and destroy two HDD's at the same time...

[Afasoas]

I think that's £79 for just the case, no disks. If you can connect a Nas to your LAN sitting somewhere secure  better IMO. It's just 'there'.  The usb array seems to be a good way to drop and destroy two HDD's at the same time...

Does have the benefit of not dealing with Samba etc..