Backup drives attached to my desktop machines are typically externally powered. The backup drive for my laptop is small, portable, and great for travel. Drives with external power supplies are generally physically larger, offer more capacity, and transfer data more quickly. USB-powered drives are typically smaller, more portable, and slower.
No additional connection: the drive is powered entirely by the USB interface. There are two approaches to powering an external drive. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using an SSD as a backup drive, as long as it is a true HD-replacement quality drive, not a cheap thumb drive. Yes, they write a copy of everything (or everything that’s changed) each time you back up, but that’s nothing compared to the constant use SSDs withstand - and are designed to handle - when used as the primary disk drive of a computer. Flash memory does wear out the more you write to it, but SSDs have a longer useable lifespan than their cheaper thumb-drive counterparts, and backups don’t write as much to the drive as you might think. The speed of an SSD is about reading data, and backups are all about writing it. The primary benefit of SSDs – speed – is unnecessary for our purpose. Even in the worst circumstances, data can typically be recovered. Once written, it stays written for a long time. Longevity: the lifespan of magnetic media is well understood. Expense: though prices are coming down, SSDs are still more expensive than traditional hard disks of the same size. In my opinion, SSDs, or Solid State Disks (which use high-quality flash memory instead of rotating magnetic platters), aren’t appropriate for backup purposes. Someday, when you get a new computer, it will likely have a USB3 interface, and you’ll have an external drive ready to take advantage of it. If your computer doesn’t support USB3, that’s okay it’s backwards compatible, and will operate at the slower USB2 speed. If your computer does support USB3 (usually indicated by the plastic in the USB connector being blue), backups will be faster. There’s simply no reason not to ensure your new drive comes with a USB3 interface, even if your computer doesn’t support it. Some choices are easy some depend at least a little on your personal setup. There are several different types of external drives. Connection methods, and even power options, vary. The good news here is that in most cases, your backup requirements - even after tripling my recommendation - will likely be smaller than the average external hard drive currently available. If you want extra safety and breathing room, double (or even triple) my recommendation. That would be enough to hold two complete and compressed full-image backups, along with overhead information (such as recovery partitions) and a healthy collection of incremental backups as well.Īs I said, that’s a bare minimum, and there are certainly situations where it could end up not being enough, depending on how you configure your backups. (Screenshot: )įor that machine, I would purchase a hard drive with a capacity of at least three times 478GB, or around 1.5TB (1434GB, rounded up). #WESTERN DIGITAL PASSPORT FOR MAC 1TB WINDOWS#
The rule of thumb I use is this: get an external drive at least three times as large as the amount of data you expect to back up.įor example, my primary Windows machine has a roughly 922GB (gigabyte) drive, of which around 478GB are used. Of course, more capacity also means a more expensive drive. It’s pretty easy to say you can never have too much capacity. Opinions and quality change often, so make sure to pay attention to the dates of specific recommendations you find.
SSDs are not worth the expense to be used as external drives, though they otherwise could be. Make sure the interface is USB3 or better. Begin by selecting an external drive that is sufficiently large to hold your backup images - I recommend three times your disk space used, at a minimum, though larger is always better.
0 kommentar(er)
