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question HDDs - portable vs internally mounted
I'm in a quandary, I'm interested in replacing some of the HDs I have
(they're around 5 years old now) or at least having a new one on hand as a spare for when needed but want to be figure out if it makes sense to shift to portable HDDs from internally mounted HDDs. My current uses are email, web surfing, vintage (ca. 1990s and early 2000s) RPG games, and periodic file backup. The two portable HDDs I have are used for medium term backup of data files. I keep them unplugged from my system when I'm not backing up files. Ad prices of 2TB portable HDDs seem quite a bit lower compared to equivalently sized internally mounted HDDs. I've seen WD 2TB portable drives (USB 3) advertised for anywhere from $60-70 and the same vendor advertising WD 2TB Black HDDs (SATA 3) around $110. Quite a bit of a price difference. Excluding the convenience of a portable drive, are there quality performance or durability reasons to prefer one type instead of the other. From what I've read, USB 3.0 is relatively close in throughput speed with that of SATA 3. Is there enough experience now with portable HDDs compared to internal HDDs to indicate how well and how long the two types of drives last before breakdown? Thanks, John |
#2
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question HDDs - portable vs internally mounted
Yes wrote:
I'm in a quandary, I'm interested in replacing some of the HDs I have (they're around 5 years old now) or at least having a new one on hand as a spare for when needed but want to be figure out if it makes sense to shift to portable HDDs from internally mounted HDDs. My current uses are email, web surfing, vintage (ca. 1990s and early 2000s) RPG games, and periodic file backup. The two portable HDDs I have are used for medium term backup of data files. I keep them unplugged from my system when I'm not backing up files. Ad prices of 2TB portable HDDs seem quite a bit lower compared to equivalently sized internally mounted HDDs. I've seen WD 2TB portable drives (USB 3) advertised for anywhere from $60-70 and the same vendor advertising WD 2TB Black HDDs (SATA 3) around $110. Quite a bit of a price difference. Excluding the convenience of a portable drive, are there quality performance or durability reasons to prefer one type instead of the other. From what I've read, USB 3.0 is relatively close in throughput speed with that of SATA 3. Is there enough experience now with portable HDDs compared to internal HDDs to indicate how well and how long the two types of drives last before breakdown? Thanks, John You read the customer reviews for a HDD product, to determine if there is an issue with them. For example, a disk I bought, a reviewer said "there is a funny noise when it shuts down". I bought one anyway, knowing this was a *design* issue and not a product quality issue. His wasn't going to be the only one. And yes, mine makes that accursed noise. The rule of thumb is "the more noise a drive makes, the sooner it breaks down". Because noise equals friction, friction makes dirt, dirt pollutes the insides of the "Class 10 clean" HDA enclosure. It must remain super-clean in there, for a long life. The noise sounds to me like a dry FDB motor bearing, during shutdown. A lubrication problem of some sort. (No, you can't do an oil change :-) ) ******* Drives are segregated a bit, according to performance. The seek time can be reduced a tiny bit, on the more aggressive designs. The Black drive is supposed to be the most aggressive drive. But it's similar to some of WDCs Enterprise offerings, which also have fast seek. The fast seek drives, when securely bolted inside your tower, you'll hear "rumbling" from the violent seeking. Maybe the seek time is 12 milliseconds as measured. Lots of home users complain about the noise from the Black, but it doesn't bother me too much. Drives where the seek is turned down, the acceleration curve for the head assembly isn't quite as violent and abrupt. The noise level of the drive drops. But the seek time might now be 16 milliseconds. That means the possibility of fewer head movements per second, important for random file transfers. You'll find the performance numbers are all over the place. When I bench these things, I'm finding "aggressive" branded drives, with "green" (wimpy) performance characteristics. All we can say in 2017, is we're getting the shaft, when the manufacturer cannot even keep its branding straight. You might be getting a "$70 drive" when you buy the "$110 product". The 2.5" drive, the seek time is likely to be a lot slower. It would make a lousy OS boot drive. It makes a "just fine" backup drive, as backups can be mostly sequential, and the heads don't move violently. As long as you understand what the final purpose of the drive will be, you can try to make an intelligent choice. The WDC Black might be intended for a boot drive. But with the practice of shafting consumers, you don't really know what the seek time will be, until it arrives. "Slow" drives for backup, isn't the end of the world. Modern commodity 3.5" drives will do 200MB/sec on the outer diameter, 100MB/sec on the inner diameter. This is a lot faster than the 60MB/sec rubbish in my older disk collection. USB3 enclosures, even the junky ones, do 200MB/sec. The enclosure is then not a limit for the HDD selected for the enclosure. The absolutely fastest HDD made today, is 15K, it has a really low seek time, and the sequential transfer is 300MB/sec. That gives you some idea what the read channel bandwidth capabilities are, and how far (some day) our commodity drives could go, given the right set of conditions. You cannot live in the same house with those drives - the noise level is suited only to server rooms. The whine and chirping would drive you nuts. USB3 includes UASP. With UASP (SCSI protocol) driver installed, with an "unlimited" USB3 controller in the Southbridge, the fastest sequential over conventional USB3 is ~450MB/sec. This is SSD speed. A SATA III SSD placed in the enclosure, will allow that speed to be realized. The best I can do with mine right now, is around 300MB/sec. I don't have the right plumbing for heroic benchmarking. When the motherboard has an "add-on" USB3 controller, the PCI Express interconnect is a bottleneck. And it happens to clip things around 200MB/sec. So now you can have two bottlenecks - the enclosure controller at 200MB/sec and the host controller at 200MB/sec. In other words, with the worst rubbish the electronics industry has to offer, the HDD speed is fully used :-) It takes a good deal of effort to select the right components to get higher than that. There is a newer version of USB that runs at 10Gbit/sec instead of 5Gbit/sec. The only purpose-built storage for it so far, benches at around 700MB/sec. It's an SSD drive with a USB3 Type C connector. And it's relatively expensive. But you don't get a lot of capacity, and it's relegated to winning bar bets. The advantage of 3.5" drives today, is you can get some pretty large ones. You can get 10TB or 12TB drives. When the drives get big enough (2TB), you need to use GPT partitioning, which means the drive might not be visible on an ancient OS. On my WinXP for example, if I want to run a backup to a GPT drive, I can boot my Win8.1 OS, and do the backup of WinXP from there. As Win 8.1 supports GPT, whereas my WinXP does not. There might have been some add-on for WinXP, to make it support GPT, but I haven't tracked that down or tested it, whatever it is. The SMART statistics from a hard drive, can give some level of "health" information, so for the older drives, you could check whether the "reallocation" field in SMART has gone non-zero. A just-as-valid check, is to bench the drive and see whether the curve has any serious divots in it. https://s33.postimg.org/ee9ti1m67/startstop.gif This is a brand new drive, being benchmarked. http://www.hdtune.com/images/screenshot.png Whereas this one probably has a lot of reallocations to slow it down. This one would go in my "scratch drive" pile. I certainly couldn't run this as a boot drive. Sluggish. And annoying. http://forum.notebookreview.com/atta...une-jpg.49651/ Paul |
#3
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question HDDs - portable vs internally mounted
On Fri, 17 Nov 2017 17:10:31 -0000 (UTC), "Yes"
wrote: Ad prices of 2TB portable HDDs seem quite a bit lower compared to equivalently sized internally mounted HDDs. I've seen WD 2TB portable drives (USB 3) advertised for anywhere from $60-70 and the same vendor advertising WD 2TB Black HDDs (SATA 3) around $110. Quite a bit of a price difference. Excluding the convenience of a portable drive, are there quality performance or durability reasons to prefer one type instead of the other. Undoubtedly. Servers, the whole of business, run huge amounts of power over national computer grid usages. HDDs being an important part of those patterns, would consequently comprise some very good resources for rating them. IT, technology specialists, on relevant WEB sites, periodically publish HDD models for comparison and quality purposes. The backlash being there's a tendency among HDD manufacturers to not release identifying marks on drives for easily classifying those with less than stellar performance ratings. Just remember an external, especially one enclosed, incurs significant heat retention, more a directly adverse effect on longevity, than even the worst designed PC case is likely to offer. |
#4
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question HDDs - portable vs internally mounted
On 18/11/2017 1:10 AM, Yes wrote:
Excluding the convenience of a portable drive, are there quality performance or durability reasons to prefer one type instead of the other. Many portable drives are using plastic as casing, which is really bad for cooling. BIOS of older computers cannot boot from USB portable drive. Some old persons might forget to unplug and pick up portable drives after doing their work, leading to leaking of data. Portable drives are easier to be stolen, too. -- @~@ Remain silent! Drink, Blink, Stretch! Live long and prosper!! / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! /( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you! ^ ^ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.39.3 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
#5
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question HDDs - portable vs internally mounted
On 18/11/2017 11:20 AM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
On 18/11/2017 1:10 AM, Yes wrote: Excluding the convenience of a portable drive, are there quality performance or durability reasons to prefer one type instead of the other. Many portable drives are using plastic as casing, which is really bad for cooling. BIOS of older computers cannot boot from USB portable drive. Some old persons might forget to unplug and pick up portable drives after doing their work, leading to leaking of data. Portable drives are easier to be stolen, too. BTW, I think Window$ (including 10) could not be booted from portable drives. -- @~@ Remain silent! Drink, Blink, Stretch! Live long and prosper!! / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! /( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you! ^ ^ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.39.3 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
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