External SSD for disk images

My external drive is failing and will need replaced. I would like to go SSD. I have been using Macrium Reflect with the Incrementals forever option. This probably puts a lot of wear on a drive after the first 30 backups as it consolidates the oldest incremental with the base image. Every day. I may consider switching to differentials to save time and wear as I assume the incrementals create a lot of disk writes. But I guess to the point, is anyone using a SSD external drive for similar tasks and do they seem to be reliable enough at this point to be suitable for this purpose?

 

i use an ssd for offline backups and a cloud service for online backups. i do only cold backups. but i can say that ssd's are pretty reliable and suitable for this purpose and failure rates for ssd's are much lower than that of hdd's because, unlike hdd's, they don't have any mechanical parts that are prone to failure. and the average ssd lifespan nowadays is well over 10 years.

 

Thanks. The hdd I have been using for 2 years is making funny noises and sometimes refusing to mount. If I spend the money for a ssd I hope it holds up. No moving parts and less power, not to mention higher speeds are a win. I just wondered if anyone had reached the point where the chips were failing from too many writes. Of the internal drives we have used the Sandisk have had a 100% failure rate. Other brands have seemed ok.

 

no problem.

wow, that surely tells something about the quality of their products. added to my list of brands to avoid. thanks.

 

Yes, I try to avoid "budget" brands when it comes to boot drives, and I go with a work-horse Western Digital HDD for external storage. Only used occasionally, is 7 years old with 99% health and 7200 rpm is totally sufficient for the use requirements.

You can get a bum drive any time but your chances of that go down the better you do, obviously.

 

Generally I agree but that's what I did and I am about to have to toss one. I'll do a warranty check first. I just ordered a Samsung T7 SSD. I hope it's good, the reviews are promising.

 

xxJackxx,

Can you let us know what sort of real world transfer speeds you get with this drive?

 

Been using an external Samsung T5 Portable 2TB SSD since 5 years. Runs like a champ like the first day I bought it. Very reliable and fast. The T7 is much faster though now.

 

Good to know. Thanks for the feedback.

 

For what it's worth, SSDs seem to be more reliable than HDDs according to Backblaze in this report, but they were used as bootdrives, so not for backups. But personally I don't want anything to do with HDDs anymore, they are just too slow and noisy. So for back ups I now also use external SSD's. The thing is, I don't often make back ups.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-review/

 

Thanks, good to know. As I mentioned in another post, this thing allowed me to back up 232 GB of data in 12 minutes. It would have been well over an hour and a half with the external HDD, which is now entirely dead.

This thing gets 1 GB/s speeds on my laptop as it has the proper port for full speed. I only get 120 MB/s on the desktop.

 

as you said in the other thread, it's a well worth upgrade.

 

Thanks for the speeds.
What ports are connected to the SSD on each computer?

 

SSD to SSD backups are super quick.
I have two internal SSDs in my laptop.

For desktops, I use WD internal mechanical drives.
I don't value the speed of backups very highly.
You can buy huge mechanical storage drives for a good price, and in my opinion, they're the best for storage.

 

This topic has encouraged a 2 TB external WD order sent out for local purposes, mainly storaging 8.1 systems ALL which are running like a top. I can just imagine how they will perform once i can transition them to strictly NvMe Hi Performance SSD's (at least 8 of Ram or 16)

 

Desktop was a USB 3 though I don't feel I am getting the full speed out of it. Microsoft keeps trying to replace the drivers with theirs.
Laptop was a Thunderbolt 3 (USB 3.1 Gen 2) port

 

For anyone else that may encounter this issue... I have been unable to eject this new drive since I got it. After some digging I found that Microsoft has once again turned on Fast startup on my system, without my consent and against my wishes. Turning it back off allows this drive to eject as expected.

 

The easiest way to backup is, windows + R, type msconfig
go to Boot tab, Boot options, check Safe boot and pick Minimal, now go back to General tab and untick "Load startup items" under Selective Startup, then OK and turn off ur pc

Connect the backup drive to ur psu and to ur motherboard, turn on pc, backup to it, turn off pc, disconnect the drive from the motherboard and psu (u don't have to disconnect it from the psu just from the motherboard actually, but never hurts in any case, also u only need to disconnect one side of the cable, i recommend the side that connects to the drive, if u disconnect the side that connects to the motherboard it's more work to plug it in again)

For backup solution, macrium reflect is not that bad but this is better - Zpaq Franz https://github.com/fcorbelli/zpaqfranz/

As such, it does not really matter what disk u buy, if u do the proper procedure all will work just fine

 

Perhaps but no GUI again? I get it and we all know some concepts develop into very formidable useful usages for user's, and this one looks to be no exception maybe. We can assume then that it is command line program only?

 

Well all the information you need is written on the page, i don't know any more than u do, i just read what it says. There's no GUI (why would u need one), but if you're really that desperate to teach your pet chimpanzee to do your dirty work instead of you, you can use https://encode.su/threads/1860-PAKKA-(ZPAQ-s-Win32-quot-versioned-quot-unpacker), however that appears to be only for extraction from the zpaq archive, to do the backup you still have to use cmd with zpaqfranz, which is **** easy if u just go and read the wiki a bit https://github.com/fcorbelli/zpaqfranz/wiki , the command list is on the right, start from top to bottom, also don't skip the examples

 

That's okay. Not interested in playing along, BUT IT IS a rather interesting project/concept that might prove useful to some with the extra time and effort to put it to good use.

 

Well, i personally do not approve of people not reading the documentation because that's crucial to understand how it works, but anyway, i will tell u how to use it, first download https://winaero.com/downloads/ExecTI.zip then run it as admin and paste "C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe" in the field and open it, from there you can confirm you have enough privileges by typing "whoami" it should say "nt authority\system", then navigate to where zpaqfranz.exe is saved (download it from releases but not the "Pre-release" build), then type this command:

Code:

zpaqfranz a d:\1.zpaq c:\* -m2 -test

the first location d:\1.zpaq is the location where the backup will be stored, it can be anything but it must end on .zpaq, the second location in this case c:\* is the folder that will be backed up, in this case the entire boot disk you can of course change it how you want, the -m2 flag is the level of compression, -m0 is no compression only deduplication while -m5 is maximum compression, -m2 is some compression but still rather fast one, -test means to verify after everything is done that the archive is working, if you want it to be encrypted you could add "-key mygoodpassword" to the command, anytime you want to add another folder to the backup you simply have to repeat and it will add the folder to the same backup you already made. you can also use -sha256 or -sha3, by default it stores fragmented sha1 hashes of the files and CRC-32 + xxhash64 of each file

then to restore from the backup type

Code:

zpaqfranz x d:\1.zpaq -f

this will restore to the original place where the files were (in this case c:\)

if you want to restore to custom location, do

Code:

zpaqfranz x d:\1.zpaq -to g:\custom\location\ -f

adding "-key mygoodpassword" to the end if the backup is encrypted, if you want to extract to a single directory add "-flat", this is like the emergency restore if everything else fails, if you don't want any files to be overwritten that are already on the disk, remove "-f", don't forget "\" at the end of the path, with -test you can check if the archive is valid, with -checksum you can force a full hash-code verification

it might not be the best for saving the entire OS tho because some things are not saved:

• other metadata such as owner, group, ACLs, last access time, etc. are not saved;
• symbolic links are not saved or followed;
• hard links are followed as if they were ordinary files;
• special file types such as devices, named pipes, and named sockets are not saved;
• the Windows version will NOT save alternate data streams (ADS) if not forced to (-forcewindows or -715);
• by default files with .zfs into the path will be ignored (unless -forcezfs or -715);
• .xls/.ppt files are by default always "hard" appended to the file (unless -xls).

however you don't need to save the entire os in any case, just saving program files, program files (x86), programdata as well as the user folder should be enough, and ofc any other specific folder you have

you can also combine it with truecrypt or whatever else u want

all this, of course, is but a tiny fraction of zpaqfranz's power. in comparison, it makes macrium reflect look like a joke

of course, you could also easily automate the backup process, make a new .bat file and add the backup command you want, you can also add

Code:

@Echo off

to make the window not appear, add "exit" as the last line, then go to task scheduler and follow the pics:









and boom that's it

of course, that assumes your backup disk is always connected to your pc. ideally you do daily backups on a disk that's always connected, and weekly backups on a disk that you only connect once a week to do the backup and then immediately disconnect, this way if smth happens to your first backup disk the second one will be 100% safe

 

The easiest way to backup, is to not mess with boot items (I don't see any point in doing so) and use a backup solution with a GUI.

 

@roger_m
That's also my opinion!