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Data storage advice sought


Enzo the Magnificent

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3 hours ago, alt-92 said:

For the rest: what @Moggy and @Rob G says: backup is something different from plain storage. I'd keep one platter HDD off-site as well once synced.

 

The problem is that there's no such thing as "plain storage". Anything digital that you want to keep NEEDS to be part of a backup strategy, or else you may as well not bother at all. Digital devices fail in ways that books, film, records and even magnetic tape can not. One copy of those old technologies is, with a little care, usually sufficient for most purposes (more is good, obviously, but who ever does that?) Digital needs to be cosseted, or else you'll lose it. 

 

Do your due diligence and research HDD reliability rates, Hitachi used to be well thought of, but nothing stands still. There's a lot of resources online about all that sort of thing. If you can, buy your drives from different retailers, so that you minimise the risk of buying a couple from a batch with production issues (rare, but it can happen - there's Monday mornings and Friday afternoons all over the world.) 

 

And then, have fun waiting for everything to copy over... 

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52 minutes ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

If you're feeling brave with one of your eBay purchases, maybe have a look inside it :whistle: 

 

 

 

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I don't even know what I'm looking at here.  Where are the memory circuits?   I assume in the things which look like USB connectors.  This does explain why the units are apparently partitioned into two "2TB" drives. 

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Looks like a cheap USB hub that someone added a couple of basic USB keys to.  You could try plugging those USB "stubs" into your laptop and see if they work.  Unlikely to be of any use though, so it'd be purely from curiosity, and in the hope it didn't destroy your laptop. :hmmm:

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10 minutes ago, Mike said:

You could try plugging those USB "stubs" into your laptop and see if they work.  Unlikely to be of any use though, so it'd be purely from curiosity, and in the hop it didn't destroy your laptop. :hmmm:

 

Er...   yeh...   I'm not gonna do that!  :lol: 

 

I think I'm finished with those drives.  Gonna find another use for the smart cases. 

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5 minutes ago, Enzo Matrix said:

 

Er...   yeh...   I'm not gonna do that!  :lol: 

 

I think I'm finished with those drives.  Gonna find another use for the smart cases. 

Some Whiffy Sci-Fi modelling maybe? :clown:

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23 hours ago, Enzo Matrix said:

The SSDs simply didn't like accepting large amounts of data.

I hadn't seen this thread before . Last night I transferred a big ish folder ,about  600 Gig of Soul music from one external HD to another  in one big  copy and  paste with no problem . I've never had that size limit  you pointed out and thats from using steam powered Windows 95 252 Mb RAM ! through 2000 ,vista  and 7 .Now on  11 they might have been a lot  slower like a whole day on 95 but they all transferred .  I have had it when trying to transfer  the entire folders with everything on it  from an old laptop to the new one replacing it though .Not including programme files obviously .. . Backed up on 2 hard drives  and looking at BT's Cloud storage next month  , love belts and braces . Remember some bloke on Soulseek ,music file sharing site lost all his music ,gone . I'd die . Still got  800 ish LPs to remind me of happier times 

Can't believe the size of your music files .You must be going back to Nero , Live in Rome 

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1 minute ago, bzn20 said:

I've never had that size limit  you pointed out

 

I think the problem here is me being a bit of a gullible nitwit and falling for an evilbay scam.  :banghead:  I can still happily transfer stuff between hard drives from reputable manufacturers.  Like you, I'm not particularly worried about transfer speeds. 

 

I record stuff legally from internet radio.  I have copies of shows going back to 2008.  The data builds up quickly! 

 

Soul music, eh?   I've got a lot of Northern Soul. 

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This has certainly been an informatjve thread, didn't know  "scam SSD" devices were out there !

 

+1 vote for Synology NAS  as a gold-standard solution (especially if your budget stretches to 4-bay devices and SHR).

 

 

For a cheaper archiving solution, something like a USB external HDD dock and multiple mechanical HDDs maybe ?

(always assume that an HDD will at some point fail , so copy what you want to keep onto at least 2...)

 

Obviously I'm completely paranoid,  and do both !    :)

(NAS for ease of access,  HDDs & dock for if the NAS breaks...)

Edited by IanHx
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On 9/23/2022 at 2:56 AM, Enzo Matrix said:

 

 

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I don't even know what I'm looking at here.  Where are the memory circuits?   I assume in the things which look like USB connectors.  This does explain why the units are apparently partitioned into two "2TB" drives. 

 

That... is amazing. The lengths that people will go to to effect a scam is... wow.

 

On the upside, it's easy to upgrade the storage capacity. :D

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A late follow up on this topic

 

Leaving defective kit to one side, both mechanical disks and SSDs WILL fail. Its just a question of when. Mechanical disks are hard to predict as something can break at any time. SSDs on the other hand are more predictable if you can find out how much they have been used (they have a life expectancy based on the number of writes performed). Happily SSDs keep a record of how they have been used.

 

I found a free utility called CrystalDiskInfo https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ which generates a report on any disks on your system, along with a health status. In the case of SSDs it looks at (among other things) the number of writes.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

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On 9/22/2022 at 5:32 PM, Enzo Matrix said:

 

My thoughts exactly.  Ah well...  live and learn. 

 

From the comments in this thread, I'm going to go for a couple of mechanical drives from a reputable manufacturer.    I like your NAS solution but I think that's a little over the top for my needs at the moment.  However, I must admit I'm tempted just by the gadget aspect. :D  

A bit late, but here's my 2c: The bolded is exactly what I was going to suggest. 4TB capacity for each should give you plenty of room to "grow" your data without having to buy extra drives for the foreseeable future, unless one fails, in which case you buy another ASAP. The ever-present spectre of drive failure is one reason why I always have at least three copies of everything important, with one copy being held off-site where possible. But then I am an IT professional: Data safety is second nature to me, even (especially!) personal data.

 

There are plenty of good programmes for keeping different sets of data (up to and including entire drives) in sync, FreeFileSync (https://freefilesync.org/) is the one I use, and as the name suggests, it's free.

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