Looking for a Good External HD

Scannerman · Sep 27, 2023

Ghot said:
View attachment 72337

My C:\ drives have about 30GB on each. Takes me 90 seconds to make a backup.
My games are all installed on my F:\ drive.

View attachment 72341

View attachment 72342

Noice. Are your SSDs switched? Would be a pain to have to connect and disconnect manually.

I keep my drives all "simple" and "basic".

Some folks don't believe me when I tell 'em this but here's the proof:

I'm not opposed to having backups either.... All kinds of backups.

Ghot · Sep 27, 2023

Scannerman said:
Are your SSDs switched?

No... I just switch the cables, when I want to switch from the Win 11 SSD to the Win 10 SSD.
Takes me under a minute.

You know you don't have to keep EVERYthing, right?

I mean I have everything back to the XP days... but I don't have ALL those drives installed.

I have a box full of WD Black hard drives. All working.

I do have an old XP machine, that still works. It's the 2nd computer in my specs.

JAM83 · Sep 27, 2023

Ghot said:
No... I just switch the cables, when I want to switch from the Win 11 SSD to the Win 10 SSD.
Takes me under a minute.

You know you don't have to keep EVERYthing, right?
I mean I have everything back to the XP days... but I don't have ALL those drives installed.

I have a box full of WD Black hard drives. All working.

Send me a WD Black HD. . lmao

Ghot · Sep 27, 2023

JAM83 said:
Send me a WD Black HD. . lmao

Naw. One of these days I'm gonna make a really big external hard drive with them.
I need to find a six bay 3.5" ext. hard drive enclosure.
I have 3x 1TB and 3x 2TB WD Blacks.

That's only 9TB total. Probably not worth the cost of the enclosure.

Yeah... not worth it. I can get an 8TB WD Black D10 ext. hard drive for $186.

JAM83 · Sep 27, 2023

Ghot said:
Naw. One of these days I'm gonna make a really big external hard drive with them.
I need to find a six bay 3.5" ext. hard drive enclosure.
I have 3x 1TB and 3x 2TB WD Blacks.

That's only 9TB total. Probably not worth the cost of the enclosure.

Yeah... not worth it. I can get an 8TB WD Black D10 ext. hard drive for $186.

6 bay raid | Newegg.com

Search Newegg.com for 6 bay raid. Get fast shipping and top-rated customer service.

www.newegg.com

Ghot · Sep 27, 2023

JAM83 said:
6 bay raid | Newegg.com

Search Newegg.com for 6 bay raid. Get fast shipping and top-rated customer service.

www.newegg.com

I don't DO Raid.

Ooooh...

Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-77Q8T0B/AM) - PCPartPicker

Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-77Q8T0B/AM)

pcpartpicker.com

JAM83 · Sep 27, 2023

Ghot said:
I don't DO Raid.

Ooooh...

Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-77Q8T0B/AM) - PCPartPicker

Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-77Q8T0B/AM)

pcpartpicker.com

lol oh that's right

JAM83 · Sep 27, 2023

Ghot said:
I don't DO Raid.

Ooooh...

Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-77Q8T0B/AM) - PCPartPicker

Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (MZ-77Q8T0B/AM)

pcpartpicker.com

If i had a spare $400 lol

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

I got both drives in. I started transferring everything to the Toshiba one, but the transfer speed fell to almost nothing, then I tried the Western Digital. . . The Toshiba was in MBR Format, and so I set up the WD with GPT. . .I don't know if that made the difference or not. I may just have to put one of the drives internal and use it that way, and then use the other one as an external backup.

pparks1 · Sep 28, 2023

JAM83 said:
I got both drives in. I started transferring everything to the Toshiba one, but the transfer speed fell to almost nothing, then I tried the Western Digital. . . The Toshiba was in MBR Format, and so I set up the WD with GPT. . .I don't know if that made the difference or not. I may just have to put one of the drives internal and use it that way, and then use the other one as an external backup.

what types of files are you copying? If it's tons of small files, the transfer rate will always suffer. But if they are big files like ISO's and the such you should maintain fast speeds.

What types of speeds are we talking?

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

pparks1 said:
what types of files are you copying? If it's tons of small files, the transfer rate will always suffer. But if they are big files like ISO's and the such you should maintain fast speeds.

What types of speeds are we talking?

Movies & TV Shows. . . 330-755KB/s. . . I just put it internal for the initial transfer. SATA is faster than USB 3.0 anyway.

pparks1 · Sep 28, 2023

JAM83 said:
Movies & TV Shows. . . 330-755KB/s. . . I just put it internal for the initial transfer. SATA is faster than USB 3.0 anyway.

755KB/sec. That doesn't seem right whatsover.

There shouldn't be much difference between USB 3 and SATA. If they were to get their theoretical max, USB 3.0 can do 5Gbps and SATA3 can do 6Gbps. So, it's only like 10% faster internally on the SATA bus.

When your external is attached, check properties in device manager on the drive and make sure that the it's set for performance with write-caching enabled.

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

pparks1 said:
755KB/sec. That doesn't seem right whatsover.

There shouldn't be much difference between USB 3 and SATA. If they were to get their theoretical max, USB 3.0 can do 5Gbps and SATA3 can do 6Gbps. So, it's only like 10% faster internally on the SATA bus.

Just copying the files kept freezing the PC, so I'm gonna try to "clone" it. . All that's on there is TV Shows & Movies anyway. . There's no other files

pparks1 · Sep 28, 2023

JAM83 said:
Just copying the files kept freezing the PC, so I'm gonna try to "clone" it. . All that's on there is TV Shows & Movies anyway. . There's no other files

You clearly have some type of problem on this PC, or with these drives then. Might want to figure out what's going on there.

As an example, on my little beelink mini PC, I just copied a 5.5GB iso file to my 4 year old Western Digital Elements external drive connected to a USB 3 port and this is what I got. It finished the copy in 32 seconds (as timed with a stopwatch)

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

pparks1 said:
You clearly have some type of problem on this PC, or with these drives then. Might want to figure out what's going on there.

As an example, on my little beelink mini PC, I just copied a 5.5GB iso file to my 4 year old Western Digital Elements external drive connected to a USB 3 port and this is what I got. It finished the copy in 32 seconds (as timed with a stopwatch)

View attachment 72397

All together, there's 2.75TB worth of video. I tried both of the HDDs that I got in the mail today too. . . . I never have this problem.

pparks1 · Sep 28, 2023

Take 1 decently large file....2GB to 8GB and do a single copy and tell me what you see compared to the screenshot that i posted above.

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

pparks1 said:
Take 1 decently large file....2GB to 8GB and do a single copy and tell me what you see compared to the screenshot that i posted above.

I will if this "cloning" thing doesn't work. . I'm just doing a full clone since all that's on the drive is Movies & TV Series..... It's going to take a few hours.

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

pparks1 said:
Take 1 decently large file....2GB to 8GB and do a single copy and tell me what you see compared to the screenshot that i posted above.

I know you know that of course. . I should've done this a long time ago! LOL

pparks1 · Sep 28, 2023

Even if cloning is faster, if you are only getting 750ish KB/s to your external drives....there is a substantial problem somewhere. That problem will still exist after the cloning is done.

Cloning is faster than imaging a drive, as with an image you are backing up the drive to a file, and then turning around and then copying that file back to a secondary hard drive. So you are really doing the transfer 2x. With cloning, you have both drives connected and you just go from 1 drive to the other in 1 shot.

JAM83 · Sep 28, 2023

pparks1 said:
Even if cloning is faster, if you are only getting 750ish KB/s to your external drives....there is a substantial problem somewhere. That problem will still exist after the cloning is done.

Cloning is faster than imaging a drive, as with an image you are backing up the drive to a file, and then turning around and then copying that file back to a secondary hard drive. So you are really doing the transfer 2x. With cloning, you have both drives connected and you just go from 1 drive to the other in 1 shot.

Keep in mind though, I'm not cloning any operating system files, or any other personal files. The ones I'm doing right now are strictly video files. I'm upgrading from a 3TB HDD to a 6TB HDD cuz I don't have anymore room for anymore Movies on the drive. I'm completely taking out the 3TB drive. (I'll put it away somewhere). I can always do some testing later when this is done.

Looking for a Good External HD

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