PeterW Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 SSD isn’t suited to this sort of thing - it’s not designed as such. Laptop HDD will be better at a third of the cost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 22, 2020 Author Share Posted January 22, 2020 I am curious why an SSD is okay as an every day disk in a laptop but is not suited to a far less demanding role of a file storage medium? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Onoff Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 My understanding is once an SSD goes tits up that's pretty much it. With an HDD always a chance it's a mechanical fault etc and data can be recovered. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteamyTea Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 3 minutes ago, Onoff said: My understanding is once an SSD goes tits up that's pretty much it. With an HDD always a chance it's a mechanical fault etc and data can be recovered. Easier and cheaper to just back up stuff. It is what data compression is for. I recently set my Mother's old PC up with the built in Windows backup. Took 5 minutes and when the things dies (it is 15 years old), it is a case of pull the memory stick out, then put it in the new PC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 22, 2020 Author Share Posted January 22, 2020 2 minutes ago, Onoff said: My understanding is once an SSD goes tits up that's pretty much it. With an HDD always a chance it's a mechanical fault etc and data can be recovered. Yes when the HDD on SWMBO's laptop died, I did manage to recover most of her files from it with some disk recovery software. I am pondering a backup strategy for this laptop, and thinking the best way would be say a monthly complete disk image and keep that on the backup drive. Then if this SSD dies I can restore to a new disk exactly as it was. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteamyTea Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 Now I know some people on here work in IT, But at the home level, how many of us have really had a disk fail. I bought a new one that was noisy from the start and it failed within a few days. Apart from that, in 26 years of using PCs at home, I have not had one fail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterW Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 SSD is a NAND chip architecture that is designed for fast IO, and will degrade over time. It doesn’t have the durability of mag media and is non-recoverable in the face of a failure. It is used in laptops as it has shock durability and also has the ability to hold an OS image for fast restart. That’s about the only benefit and it is really down to speed and durability of processing which you don’t want or need for long term slow access storage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 22, 2020 Author Share Posted January 22, 2020 We have had 2 HDD failures both on laptops that SWMBO uses. First was in about 2008 when the HD of her then Vista computer crashed. I recovered most of the stuff off that and and that pc got a new HDD and Ubuntu and was what I was using until a few days ago. Then just before Christmas the HDD on her present laptop with W10 crashed. We looked at getting a new laptop then, but I did not see anything that floated my boat then, so that got a new SSD and a fresh install of W10 and most of her files recovered from the old HDD. I have never had an HDD fail on the probably less harsh environment of a desktop pc. I have plugged the backup disk into the router now and that seems to be working, and it does spin down when not being accessed, So I will go and order a USB caddy and a HDD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Davies Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 3 hours ago, ProDave said: I guess an HDD would probably be too much power to just plug into the router and would need a separate power supply. Depends on the drive. Ones sold as “portable” USB drives should be OK as they're low enough power to run off the USB connection, others sold as “desktop” have a separate power supply. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 22, 2020 Author Share Posted January 22, 2020 I have just looked in the box, and both the laptop HDD's that we have had fail have been Western Digital. Call me silly but I think I will avoid any more from them. What make is recommended these days? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteamyTea Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 (edited) 57 minutes ago, ProDave said: Western Digital Think the one I had fail was WD too. Edited January 22, 2020 by SteamyTea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Davies Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 1 hour ago, ProDave said: Call me silly but I think I will avoid any more from them. OK, you're silly. More seriously, I've read a piece ages ago where a company with a lot of drives kept careful records and found there was no real difference between the major manufacturers over the long run. Particular manufacturers have periods where their drives are a bit more flaky, presumably as they push technology, but then they get it sorted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gc100 Posted January 23, 2020 Share Posted January 23, 2020 (edited) There really isn’t any reason not to used one of the cloud storage providers. As already mentioned above there are many advantages. Unless you are dealing with GB size files or terrible internet connection all the time or something incriminating there really isn’t not to use it. It will be more secure and redundant than anything you can create at home. I’d recommend Amazon AWS if you are concerned about price, availability and security though not user friendly. If you want something super simple then dropbox (which stored everything on Amazon anyhow and your local devices) Edited January 23, 2020 by gc100 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 23, 2020 Author Share Posted January 23, 2020 Well I have ordered a Seagate 500MB HDD for a shade under £20 I already have a USB2 disk caddy I could put it into. How much faster would it be if I instead bought a USB3 caddy? If the BT hub 4 even supports USB3? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AliG Posted January 23, 2020 Share Posted January 23, 2020 The HH4 is only USB 2.0. I also found some people complaining that the USB is very slow due to a lack of processing power. This review suggests that you can only get a speed of 2.7MB/second from the HH4, the official limit of USB 2.0 is 60MB/s and of USB 3.0 is 640MB/s (bytes not bits here) https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/bt-home-hub-4-performance-verdict-page-2 A HDD will probably run at 100-150 MB/Second, a bit above the USB 2.0 speed, USB 3.0 is mainly beneficial on a faster SSD. USB 2.0 would be fine for backups. The other limiting factor will be are you connecting over WiFi or a cable, your in house WiFi speed may not be fast enough to use all the capacity anyway. But again all this is moot if the USB is as slow as suggested. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ProDave Posted January 30, 2020 Author Share Posted January 30, 2020 This is now a completed project. I formatted the HDD as NTFS even though several people said a BT hub will only work with FAT32. Well it does work with NTFS thankfully. I had some fun and games getting W10 to see the network disk. Just like on Zorin you cannot browse the network to find it. Thanks to people who have trodden this path before and posted their findings on line, with W10 you first have to drill down into some windows settings and turn on SMB1.0/CIFS Client support. then you have to map a network drive and manually enter the address \\192.168.1.254\usb1 So all working and I have all my files accessible from any computer now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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