jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I watched Ask Leo last night. The question was what kind of drive to buy. He came out strongly in favor of an HDD, 5400 RPM, USB3 for backups. He said the higher cost of an SSD made that a non-choice for him. When doing a backup, a little more speed doesn't matter, but double the price does. The cost per TB goes down the larger the drive is, so getting a drive three times larger than your current needs will be good for several years. He like WD and the G-Drives. Something to think about and discuss.

A quick look on Amazon -
https://smile.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Advance-Portable-External/dp/B08JKHY4Y1/ref=sxin_13_pa_sp_search_thematic_sspa?cv_ct_cx=G-drive&dchild=1&keywords=G-drive&pd_rd_i=B08JKHY4Y1&pd_rd_r=4cac4e65-fb3c-4db8-91a7-f35a03d26b1b&pd_rd_w=jgirz&pd_rd_wg=g1HjJ&pf_rd_p=c2190747-2331-4abe-9300-6a691476581c&pf_rd_r=9D2VE555442V07ZZ8T1S&qid=1633530377&sr=1-4-a73d1c8c-2fd2-4f19-aa41-2df022bcb241-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFUMzRDRlBVN0JZM0ImZW5jcnlwdGVkSWQ9QTAzNDc1MjAxQUpTVktaRkhTNksxJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTA1NDY4MTczODYwMFdOOUVTSkoxJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3Bfc2VhcmNoX3RoZW1hdGljJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==

rcarol

What's more important to me is that I can bounce an SSD off the deck and it will most likely continue to function properly.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes! For travel, I would prefer an SSD. If the drive is sitting for years on my desk, an HDD is fine.

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

How long will A spinning disk last compared to an SSD?

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

Having had the displeasure of owning some 5400 RPM drives, I would NEVER buy one again. My personal time is more valuable that a few bucks. 7200 RPM drives ROCK in comparison. For backup at home, I use only HHDs in Synology servers in RAID 1. Best of luck.

lbrande

I use only enterprise drives in my tower. I have 5 spinning 24/7/365 for 12 years. Only 1 potential failure. in that time, and the drives had a 5 year replacement warranty. They are still running strong.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I have a similar Synology setup plus two external drives. If I lost it all tomorrow, I would survive. My files are of family and travel pictures, some financial stuff, and miscellaneous junk. When I'm gone, no one is going to care what's on my drives. Doing these backups is just part of the "computer game" for me. People tend to think they are more important than they are.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I like the Enterprise drives OWC has. A 12TB drive with a five year warranty costs around $300 for the bare drive, plus a $45 DIY USB 3.2 compatible enclosure. They also have 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB (and much smaller) versions of the same enterprise class drive. And they also sell them pre-assembled.

These are not super fast, at 276 MBPS Write / 258 MBPS Read speeds (on the 18TB drive), but they are very reliable as backup devices.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I like HGST enterprise drives - DeskStar. For some reason, I hesitate to buy drives larger than 5TB. That's large enough for me, anyway. For doing backups, speed is irrelevant.

mflowe Loc: Port Deposit, MD

I agree. I always use hdd's for my backup drives. The lower cost more than offsets the slower speed. I do prefer ssd's for my main drives.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

The only SSD drive I have is internal to my iMac. The externals are all G-Tech drives. My backups are done on one of the G-Tech drives along with internal HDD drives in two other desktop computers.
--Bob

Bayou

Software driven local backups usually occur unattended, so there is no penalty to using a slower drive. It's a waste of money to use SSD in this application.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, internal SSDs are great. I put one into my old MacBook Pro, but I'm not about to take the iMac desktop apart.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yeah, I’ve done it successfully. It is not easy and it’s nerve-wrackingly detailed work. OWC has videos and iFixIt has fully illustrated online guides, but it is still tricky.

noobie Loc: South Chicago

[quote=jerryc41]I watched Ask Leo last night. The question was what kind of drive to buy.

When purchasing a HDD these days, you might want to pay attention to what recording technology it is using. In the past, pretty much all drives used Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) where tracks are written side-by-side and do not overlap.

Beginning a year or so ago, all of the major HDD manufacturers began slipping Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives into their product lines --- WITHOUT telling anyone. With SRM, the tracks overlap much like shingles on a roof. The upside of this is greater track density which leads to using less platters and heads than CRM drives and then, ultimately, to high-capacity drives that cost less a lot less to manufacture. The downside is that SMR handles using/releasing free space in a weird/inefficient way and in some applications that activity can create serious problems. If you are filling a backup drive by creating/deleting large backup images or if you are using a RAID array, for example, you'd be well advised to ensure any new drive you purchase is a CMR drive.

SMR does result in lower performance, but it enables cost savings that are attractive to some users, and if used in the correct types of workloads, those savings are worth the exchange of gaining access to deeper capacity. However, using SMR tech for desktop and laptop boot drives will likely remain a topic open for debate, as their underwhelming performance in sustained random write workloads could hamper performance in standard operating systems.

Check it out: Google (or DuckDuckGo) is your friend.