^^Believe me you're doing a whole lot better than people who still don't back up AT ALL in this day and age.

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
Onboard backup is fine (there's even such a thing as backup partitions on the same hard drive), but it prevents the ability for periodic swapping of BU drives for storage non-locally (for example taking a drive home with you). You're vulnerable to fire, damage, and theft otherwise.

With most modern (Intel- don't do AMD) chipset motherboards it is possible to hot swap secondary drives (SATA).
A hot swap bay makes it seamless ($25+).
I have even installed SSD hot swap bays.
I have taken many "original" hard drives in system upgrades > recertified/tested/cleaned/formatted and used that drive for an auxiliary backup drive - both SSD or Spinner.
You don't need the same performance level for a backup drive as you do for the OS or data.

YMMV

Lots of reasons these things die more frequently:

- Worse thermal control. Sticking the drive in a plastic case makes it harder to dissipate heat, sure. However, as these are portable, more people tend to move them around between cold buildings, hot cars, etc. and so there are more drives that experience wild temperature swings compared to sitting in a PC all day.

- They get banged around more. Yes, many drives are now designed to automatically park the heads if they go into freefall, and they are all rated to withstand a shock of some number of G's. However, they are only rated to take that sort of shock a certain number of times. Getting bumped around in travel does put more wear and tear on the mechanical components of a drive. Even if YOU never take your drive off the desk, other folks do, and that drives up failure rates.

- The power supplies are often crap. The drives that are powered directly off a USB port don't have as much of a problem, but pretty much every power brick I've owned for one of these external drives is much more primitive and poorly regulated than the power supply in my computer.

- The drive controllers are crap AND poorly cooled. The USB-to-SATA controllers they use in these things are dirt cheap, and not terribly reliably. Most PC's will have several SATA channels controlled by the CPU's chipset, which is of higher quality, more reliable, and performs better. Even the additional channels driven by separate SATA controller chips tend to be of better quality than what you get in an external drive. Also, these controller chips in the external drives tend to heat up under heavy load, and almost never have any sort of dedicated heatsink or airflow to cool them down. This has gotten worse with USB 3.0 and 3.1 as they can move much more data per second, and the increased processing load to actually deliver that results in more heat.

I do own a few external drives, but I don't use them frequently. What I do use more often is what I call a Hard Drive toaster. Same crappy controllers and power supplies, but you plug drives into it like putting bread in a toaster rather than the thing coming with a drive. That way I can buy a bare drive that is of known quality and at least control that part of the equation. Plus, with the drives sticking up in the air, they can dissipate heat better.

- Bret

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
Onboard backup is fine (there's even such a thing as backup partitions on the same hard drive), but it prevents the ability for periodic swapping of BU drives for storage non-locally (for example taking a drive home with you). You're vulnerable to fire, damage, and theft otherwise.

With most modern (Intel- don't do AMD) chipset motherboards it is possible to hot swap secondary drives (SATA).
A hot swap bay makes it seamless ($25+).
I have even installed SSD hot swap bays.
I have taken many "original" hard drives in system upgrades > recertified/tested/cleaned/formatted and used that drive for an auxiliary backup drive - both SSD or Spinner.
You don't need the same performance level for a backup drive as you do for the OS or data.

YMMV

Good to know! Thank you.

I buy a tested external drive case with a better chipset and at least one fan and populate it with whatever hard drives I wish.

My current favorite case is an Oyen Digital Mobius 5-bay case. Easy open and close, 2 large and quiet fans and not one single problem in the 2 years I’ve used it. My husband has the 2-bay case that has one large, quiet fan and no problems for him in one year of use.

Both cases have several options for RAIDs or allow JBOD (each drive separate).

I hate the premade external drives. Poor heat management, cheap chipsets and terrible power supplies.