Upping storage

[wove]

The downside of putting bigger drives in your machines is that then you have to get bigger drives for backups. I have a nice external case, that has ports for Firewire 800, USB and eSATA and it has worked as a backup drive for about a decade. I wanted to get a 2TB drive for it to increase its storage, but they have been more than I cared to spend.

The other day while checking prices on 2TB drives, I noticed that 2TB external backup drives were about half the price of the 2TB internal drives, so I bought a new external backup drive. Glancing through the list of available external backup drives I noticed that all the external drives at about all the various sizes were about 1/2 the price of an internal drives. That seems odd. I would think that the external backup drives must have internal drives inside them.

The backup drive I purchased is a Toshiba Canvio. It only have a USB(3.1) A connector, which will connect to most I have. It backed up about 550GB from the T580 in around an hour, incremental backups in the future will be much faster.

As I have retired a couple 250GB drives after replacing them with bigger drives. I have repurposed them for data storage. One for pictures, one for documents, one for music etc. I format them as exFat which can be read by everything I have and can also handle data files over 4GB, which is sometimes needed for video files. I have SATA to USB adaptors and use them like oversized thumb drives. Being 2.5" drives they are large enough to put a nice big label on them to list the contents.

[crosscourt]

Im using 2tb nvme ssds in many of my systems and I tend to back them up using either older 2tb spinning drives or 2.5 sata ssds. Used 2tb spin drives are cheap and occasionally you see new drives for cheap . 2tb nvme ssds are around $65-70 which amazes given what I paid for some in the past. The 2tb spin drives I picked up were about $25 each but Im at the point where I simply dont use spin drives much anymore. Once youve used ssds theres no going back. I keep external cases on hand to use but also use the Sata to USB adapters like thumb drives. 2.5 drives are really nice except the spin versions are really slow.

[crosscourt]

With all the changes in storage, Im still amazed how reliable spinning drives are, as Ive got 15 year old drives that still work well.

[wove]

I have rarely ever experienced any problems with spinning hard drives. The external 2TB backup drive I just purchased is a spinning drive. It handles data incoming and outgoing over USB at an acceptable rate. The first full system backup took about an hour, and incremental backups done a couple times a week, take about 15 minutes. I am very content with its performance.