3 Replies Latest reply: Mar 19, 2014 8:19 PM by Trevor Dennis

OT: External Drives for backup etc.

Trevor Dennis Mar 16, 2014 4:10 PM

This is a wee bit off tropic, but we do have a lot of hardare threads on this forum. Regular readers might be aware that I have used WD My Book USB3 external drives for backup and additional data, but have had two out the of the six I have purchased over a number of years, break on me. Both times it was the USB3 interface, and I was able to retrieve the data and use the drives as internal SATA.

When my system crashed big time a few days ago, I needed an additional level of backup to make the reinstallation as smooth as possible, but this time I went with a 4Tb Seagate USB3 Expansion drive. It sits flat, rather than upright like the WD My Books.

By heck it is fast. I have not run a full test, but I am seeing 180Mb/s on continuous throughput of a 2Gb zipped file. I tested the WD My Books at about 110Mb/s read and write for continuous throughput of sequentual files. That's a big difference. In fact it is a lot faster than my stand alone WD Black internals, which test around the same speed as the WD My Books. Actually, that is no surprise as when I dismantled the failed My Book to remove the USB3 interface, it had a WD Black inside. D'oh!

The two Samsung 256Gb Pro SSDs arrived this morning. I thought they had forgotton to put them in the box as it felt so light. They are the size of a big postage stamp. I have commitments over today and tomorrow, and hope to start the rebuild on Wednesday, so I'll report back how well they perform in a raid0 after that.

1. Re: OT: External Drives for backup etc.

Mike M Mar 16, 2014 5:21 PM (in response to Trevor Dennis)

Seagate vs WD = Seagate, hands down. Better transports, more reliable and faster.

Samsung makes some good SSDs from what I've read. I don't have one but I have my eye on a 1Tb for my Mini.
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2. Re: OT: External Drives for backup etc.

Noel Carboni Mar 18, 2014 10:33 PM (in response to Trevor Dennis)

Hi Trevor,

I use and love the Western Digital MyBooks. Unlike you, I haven't had any fail, but I only use USB2 - maybe that's less problematic, since it's slower.

A while back there was a thread on the Microsoft Technet forum in which folks were claiming several different brands of external USB drives were being seen to corrupt data - e.g., very long video files would occasionally have a few bytes changed. At that time I extensively tested the MyBooks I had, really raking them over the coals, and could not reproduce the problem - which endeared them to me greatly.

I checked again when I moved up to Windows 8.1, and again, the MyBook swallowed and regurgitated many gigabytes without so much as a single byte error or hiccup - so again my MyBook drives earned a place in my heart. I do my nightly Windows system image backups to a 3TB MyBook.

-Noel
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3. Re: OT: External Drives for backup etc.

Trevor Dennis Mar 19, 2014 8:19 PM (in response to Noel Carboni)

I'll use this thread to say that I am back up and running after my reinstall, but have not installed Photoshop yet, because of my crap broadband, and having all the Windows updates to install, and stuff like AV and all those boring things that you have to give priority. I have run Crystal Disk Mark on the two Samsung 256Gb Pro in raid0 for the OS drive, and while I am not quite qetting the Gb/s that Bill on the PremPro Hardware forum posted, it is close enough

What is really impressive are the 4K results. I was happy with the sequentual result for the 2 x 6th Gen Velociraptors in a raid0 Project drive, but just compare the two arrays for the smaller block sizes. And that probably has a lot more impact on real world performance.

I don't have any big apps installed to test the system with, but everything feels very snappy again.
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