External hard drive


winterdd
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So i found an older 250gb external hard drive someone gave me a while back. Its definitely not one of the  newer ones. I reluctantly plugged it in and it seems fine and it 100 percent empty/clean. Would you guys trust older hardware to save your projects on? Figured it would save me 70-100 bucks. I have alot of prior CA projects on my pc now and wanted to clear some space and keep it running smooth. My system info is in sig. You guys use hard drives or flash drives?

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Don't know if I would trust an antique HDD (with

all those moving parts that can fail) as a back-up

drive, but I do use my older SATA SSD drives as

super flash drives. All you need is a SATA to USB

adapter cable and you can use your old internal

SSD drive as an external storage device.

Very handy. 

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I'd recommend an old-school HDD array in raid1.  However, I also always start with new hardware (and 250GB is fairly small).  I also backup this raid to an offsite usb SDD using windows "SyncToy" which does a remarkably good job for built-in windows tool.  I'm not worried about high-speed connections between the drives.  My setup that I'm very pleased with (lots of redundancy):

 

work PC -> file server* (w/ mirrored array) -> home PC -> usb HDD (redundant backup)

I've previously used OneDrive as well, but prefer the server.

 

* - this is just a regular tower with a pretty basic board running Windows Server OS (very robust) connected to the LAN.  Minimal performance specs.  It runs continuously except for a few extended power outages (~1 hr) when I learned my UPS battery was bad).  As its a separate machine, my workPC doesn't see any decrease in performance.  I maybe have $1000 into all of this excluding the work PC (~6 years ago).

 

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I use iCloud mainly as it syncs so well and is very robust.  I do have a dropbox (I think they call it ultra) upgraded account as well as a google drive but those are shared drives with some clients.  On top of the iCloud that I use I use a Drobo NAS with some quality HDD drives in the office which gets an hourly Time machine backup.  I also time to time do a full backup of my user library to both the cloud as well as the NAS.

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About 10 years ago, I invested in a Synology DS211+ 6TB (2 x 3000GB) 2-bay NAS Server and glad I did. Although it's support life has ended, it is still running strong and Synology still has regular updates. It has many features - archiving many photos, files, etc. It can be your own personal cloud, audio and video server as well. I have StorageCraft ShadowProtect SPX on all of our home/office networked PCs performing regular backups to the NAS. About 2 years ago, I purchased two 6TB drives because they were getting less expensive and I just felt the NAS need some breathing room for storage area. I pulled one of the 3TB drives out of the NAS "hot" and plugged in a new 6TB drives and with a few clicks, the NAS system began rebuilding the data for the new drive in system. It took several hours, but all went well. I did the same for the second 3TB drive.

 

Two types of computer users - those who backup regularly and those who wish they had!

 

Sorry for the long post.

 

...Bob

NAS_Drive.png

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Wow! That's nuts how technology has changed. Off topic here a bit, my first PC in 1986 had a 20MB HDD the size of dictionary - thought I'd never run out of disk space. Now, my smart phone can take photos that can be larger than 20MB!  That same smart phone of mine has a 120GB micro SD card the size of a dime and my computer has a 500GB NVMe PCIe SSD drive on a circuit board the size of club cracker. Back to work now!

 

...Bob

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Given the exponential increase in data retention requirements that have occurred over the last 10 years I have gone with a tiered approach to preserving my data. Completed projects/designs have been permanently archived using a Blu-ray burner using reasonably priced 100/50GB M-Disks. These have a  projected lifetime of several hundred years (based on ISO/IEC 16963 testing) or longer. Prior to this I was burning critical data files (irreplaceable) using DVD's. I have used either hardware or software based hot-swap RAID arrays in my workstations for many years. I never did adopt NAS, though admittedly I probably should have. I am running 4 2TB HDD drives in RAID 10 in 2 hot swap drive bays for less than I would have paid for a single 4TB enterprise level SSD.

 

Depending on what I am doing I burn either to DVD or blu-ray daily or weekly using a portable burner, then consolidating to Blu-ray M-Disk as needed.  The bottom line is anything I can't afford to lose is maintained physically separated from my work area and always air-gapped from my LAN/internet. The key to a good inexpensive small business back-up plan is developing good habits from day 1 so that after a while it becomes automatic. I admit that I did not, and early on it cost me dearly in time and money.

 

Ironically, now that SSD's have finally matured with the advent of PCLe Gen 4 M.2 drives offering amazing cost/performance benefits, the use of some sort of conventional multi-terabyte (and cheap) HDD array is more relevant (for me) than ever. In my opinion SSD's have 3 major weaknesses: First is the cost, large capacity 4TB SSD's in RAID is simply too expensive right now. Second, in the event a single SSD fails, the chances for data recovery are essentially nil. And third is the question of data integrity and retention if they remain powered off for long periods of time-the jury is still out. Everybody has different needs, mine are tempered by the fact that I am retired and now do this for recreation rather than sustenance. Just my 2 cents.

 

New workstation: Previous (...) X11-SSA. Chief user for decades.

Win 10 Pro (Win 8.1 Pro)

AMD 3950X-water cooled (Prev Intel 4930K-water cooled)

ASUS ROG STRIX E-Gaming (ASUS X-79)

G.Skill Trident Z Royal 64GB 3600mhz (G.Skill 32GB)

Sabrent Rocket PCLe Gen 4 1TB Primary drive (Samsung 850 Pro 500GB)

Samsung 860 Pro 1TB scratch drive (from old system)

Seagate Barracuda Pro 4TB (4) RAID10 (Western Digital 1TB RAID)

MSI RTX 2080 Sea Hawk- (EVGA GTX 2080 Hybrid-) basically waiting on AMD/NVidia

BENQ 32" 1440P Monitor

Lian Li O11D-XL (Phanteks Enthoo)

 

 

 

 

 

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