For how long are you using your External HDD ? Which brand is it ?

[mastablasta]

Haha, No the cloning dock is just that - it clones the whole drive.

ok i thought you are into some film business or something.

then you actually just need versioned backups. they are super fast. as The fu demonstrated.

aside from CLI utilities there are GUIs that will setup the scripts. they would then do incremental backups.

Areca & Duplicati seemed to work best when i tried them out (though i did seek something that would work on linux and windows).

but for example if you just experiment with system on the drive then snapshots using BTRFS or ZFS4linux might be faster. or virtual machines.

[TheFu]

snapshots alone aren't backups. They are a method to freeze specific blocks so that a backup tool can get a 100% quiesced backup. Snapshots are handy for a few other uses, like being able to roll back a recent update/change.

Please don't confuse what virtualbox calls a snapshot with what ZFS, LVM, and btrfs call snapshots.

Also, before deciding to use btrfs, some light reading: https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs#Warnings

[Tadaen_Sylvermane]

Ive got a couple 2tb usb 3.0 drives holding media and snapraid parity on my server. Haven't had a fail in 3 years. My dad keeps his media and data on a pair of usb 2.0 drives on his mac. As far as I know those drives are at least 8 or 9 years old now with no trouble. I think the fact that these drives almost never physically move contributes to longevity.

[vidtek]

ok i thought you are into some film business or something.

then you actually just need versioned backups. they are super fast. as The fu demonstrated.

aside from CLI utilities there are GUIs that will setup the scripts. they would then do incremental backups.

Areca & Duplicati seemed to work best when i tried them out (though i did seek something that would work on linux and windows).

but for example if you just experiment with system on the drive then snapshots using BTRFS or ZFS4linux might be faster. or virtual machines.

I guess I'm just an old fart with old-fashioned ideas. Hard drives are so cheap nowadays, and I don't have a lot else to spend my money on, I sure 'aint gonna leave it all to my avaricious Chinese/Aussie daughter-in-law........

I just like the certainty of a another physical identical clone I can lay my hands on......but I also have cloud backups of my 'photos and wills.....

[freebird54]

I'm a bit of the old-school type as well - which means that along with the fact that they have never (yet) failed me I have USB2.0 externals. 2 of them are Seagate 2Tb 'Expansion Desk' drives, from 2008 and 2010 (approx) and the third is an Iomega 1tb that I inherited from my sister - I think it is from around 2005 (to augment zip and Jaz drives). They are relegated to backup status now (as I run hi-cap drives internally) and have never blinked as yet - although it is a pain that their SMART system doesn't report temperatures I don't expect that overwork will trouble them!

Freebird54

[lammert-nijhof]

I bought a Samsung 320GB external drive in 2009. After a while I swapped it with my Seagate 160GB laptop drive. The Samsung drive was ~2 times as fast with a throughput of ~80MB/s instead of ~50MB/s, but it had 10 bad sectors. Probably the reason, why a fast drive ended up in an USB 2.0 enclosure. With the new drive Vista started to get somewhat useable. When that laptop died in 2017, I moved that drive in 2019 to my backup server, a Pentium 4 HT. It is now used with FreeBSD and ZFS and its is working together with 2 IDE desktop HDDs and another 320GB laptop HDD on a SATA-1 plug .

However that Samsung ex-external drive is still the fastest of the four and it still has 10 bad sectors!

[21Jerry]

I'm moving away from WD drives. I must have 10TB of WD SATA drives sitting around that have stopped all together or failed to reassign sectors. One is a 4TB that I barely used and then found it only had a 1yr warranty. On the other hand, I have a ton of seagate drives going back to 20Gig 10K RPM drives that are still working. I have a quantum fireball and I think it might have been my first drive??? Still works, I think it is 8Gig. I had three WD drives go bad within a few months of each other in a raid array (striped, bummer). They were 1TB drives, all crossed the 36 month line and then started failing. I thought I had a power or memory problem but I confirmed it was the individual drives. The other thing that bugs me is that the 'green' drives, I think, can't be used in simple raids. Something about timing out? I can't remember. They have a parameter I thought you could set to not time-out but it didn't help.

I can go on for hours about the WD My Cloud problems I had before giving up.

[ereagle33]

I am using a Seagate Momentus (ST9500325AS, 500GB, 2.5 inch, 5400 rpm, 8MB cache) drive that I bought from Newegg in 2010. It is my main media drive for recordings on my HTPC (Intel Atom, NVIDIA ION, MythTV) and has been running 24/7 since 2010. I went with the 2.5 inch for power reasons and for quiet and the 5400 rpm is plenty quick enough to record and/or stream 1080 video. Seagate is my choice.

Oh... external HDD... in that case...

I have two Seagate Freeagent Go drives from 2008... 320GB and 640GB. Don't get used a lot, but have been moved to newer USB 3.0 enclosures and are used regularly for backup and as a transfer medium for media files between an HTPC and a desktop. Seagate is still my choice.

[kurt18947]

I bought a toolless 3.5" USB3 enclosure and a 1 TB. Seagate AV HD for around $50 total. It uses external power so is pretty fast and I can swap HDs as I need to. That in combination with an Rsync GUI does what I need it to do. I just back up data and some config info, I don't worry about drive imaging when I can have a functional fresh install in less than 30 minutes.

[mastablasta]

is USB 3 as fast as SATA3 (transfer speed)? i tried to get this information in wiki and it seem like they have simlar speed. i see there are external SSD drives available and nvme drives with almost double transfer speed of SSD drive. pricey, but fast. might solve the issue for laptops with small drives (256 GB) and no expansion slot in them.