Are external storage drives finally safe to use?

One other thing, speaking as a home user I don't baggie-chase drive reliability or nitpick specifications. I just look for obvious failures and glaring faults. Beyond that is a waste of time. I'm more than happy to purchase 2 of each of the same capacity, one from Seagate and one from Western Digital. There. My stuff is safe by redundancy. And that's good enough for me.

 

My experience with external HDs has been good. USB and eSATA. No failures. I just ran a test on a 2TB USB3 WD "My Passport" HD. A laptop HD in an enclosed plastic case.

Plugged in and HD temperature was 25°C (room temperature). 63 GB of data was written to the HD over the next 18 minutes. Temperature rose to 37°C. A further 99 GB of data was written to the HD over the next 24 minutes. Temperature rose to 44°C. Over the next 30 minutes the temperature fell to 35°C.

No heat problems with this HD.

 

Laptop hard drives are designed to operate in an enclosed space with minimal ventilation.
40°C is the magic number for longevity.

 

I'm looking for that good 3.5" USB 3 enclosure to hold a Sata 3 HGST Ultrastar drive. There use to be quite a few very good enclosures, but now most of what I've looked at looks pretty cheap and have less than stellar reviews. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

 

I use all aluminum enclosure for all the external HDDs, either 2.5'' or 3.5'', for better heat dissipation. Plastic is a bad material for heat dissipation. I am leaning towards using more 2.5'' ones since these appear to be more robust than their 3.5'' counterparts.

 

Thanks oliverjia- Can you mention the brand(s) you've had the best luck with. I agree with your assessment of the likely benefit of the 2.5" drive. Thoughts on AC powered vs USB powered.

 

I use several Vantec aluminum enclosures, 3.5 and 2.5 in. They are good, no problems. But it seems that now are more expensive and difficult to find.

 

I used to buy ORICO 2595US3, and Ultra U12-40650. These work quite well. You can also find on ebay some dynex aluminum usb 3.0 those work well also. You can find these on eBay or Amazon.

Vantec mentioned by Robin also is a good one.

 

If you use your external HDD only at home or office, at rarely move it, then a 3.5'' might be your choice since it normally has better capacity; if you use it on the move or have to move it quite frequently, then 2.5'' is the way to go. A 2.5'' HDD is more resilient to shock/shake while running by design, so a bit of small move won't kill it.

 

Has anyone ever used the Other World Computing (OWC) Elite mini enclosure?

 

I believe I may have found an excellent 2.5" enclosure: http://oyendigital.com/USB-3.0-hard-drive.html

I'm now trying to decide whether to go SSD or 2.5" hard drive. Currently I only use one traditional hard drive which is a 750 GB My Passport that I use for backups alon with 6 SSDs on two computers.

 

You would think (or hope) they are more reliable because they are normally used less. But at the moment I have made a back up of my most important data on 3 external HDD's, just to be on the safe side. They are all from different brands: WD, Lacie and Iomega. The oldest drive (Iomega) is 7 years old, and all drives still function OK.

 

Paragon, if you're talking about the population of that enclosure, and your plan is USB connection... Windows WILL NOT TRIM a USB connected SSD... no support that I know of. If you need some speed for commonly used data from that device, I'd use a SSHD of some sort... if you just need good swift data access (both write and read), the WD Black series 2-1/2" is probably one of the better ones for speed in general.

 

My Sincere Thanks Mr. Frog! I had totally forgotten that TRIM doesn't work on an SSD connected via USB. Would you go with the WD Black in lieu of HGST? I want reliability along with decent speed.

 

Well, I can't give you any personal reliability info (haven't used HGST 2-1/2" devices), but if you'd like, I can easily run a quick test of a BLACK 750gB through a USB3 adapter if that helps... lemme know.

Both the WD BLACK and the HGST Travelstar use a 32mB cache and 7200rpm spinner so I s'pect the performance will be about the same... just don't know about the reliability.

 

Had a few minutes so, using the ATTO benchmark, I ran the WD Black 750gB 2-1/2" HDD through both an Intel SATA III port and an Intel USB3 port (via a snapon Raygo USB3 adaptor)... results were about the same...

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the product looks solid, although the controller chip is commonplace among external enclosures: Asmedia 1153E controller.
An SSD is not good for archival purposes. Once an SSD go bad, you have almost zero chance to recover the data stored in there. With a HDD, you normally have a good chance to recover your data before it go completely dead. So another reason to go with external HDD rather than SSD.

 

Many Thanks Mr. Frog!

 

Thanks for the extremely helpful information Oliverjia! It sucks getting older

 

And with HDDs we do?

The JEDEC spec for SSDs require the ability to read data off the drive one year after it dies.

~ Removed Off Topic Remarks and Link ~

 

i looked on Amazon at a few different brands of "ruggedized" and the price wasnt to much higher than regular drives -maybe 10-20% is all.

might be worth it.

 

Sorry I meat to say premature death of an SSD. In such cases, rescue of data is extremely difficult, if possible at all.

 

I have an older (~2.5 years or so) WD USB 3.0 750 GB My Passport portable drive that I use as one of my backup drives. The average speed of a backup with Macrium 5 or 6 is > 500 MB/sec for a 100 GB backup. I have restored at least 3-4 times with the drive. Seems awfully fast is this an anomaly?

 

I'm not sure where you're getting that speed but my guess is you're getting it from Macrium.

That's most likely an "equivalent" speed that takes in account Macrium's data compression. No HDD spinner at 7200rpm moves data at that speed. The 3.5" BLACK is a tad faster than the 2.5" version but neither can reach those speeds, especially in a sustained mode.

 

I can't reconcile this statement with two facts:
1) With HDDs it is impossible without cost-prohibitive data recovery services
2) With SSDs, data can be read for at least a year afterwards, assuming the SSD complies with standards