BAckup harddrive, how many partitions

I don't save videos or anything really big (I only hae 100Gig of files
now) so when I ended up with a 1.5T harddrive for a backup drive, I
thought I'd put both internal HD's on the same external backup.
Plenty of space. I also put my laptop and the laptop of a friend's,
(that I was fiddling with and who I knew didn't do backups.) Plenty of
space! Enough for my second desktop too, when I get that running.

(I forget what you call what I'm using. A caddy, that's it!! It's a
USB plugin by BlacX and it has two slots, and each accepts a 3.5" bare
hardddrive (or 2.5" harddrive). You can even copy from one slot to the
other.)

But now it occurs to me that while I'm backing up one drive, I"ll be
wearing out the mechanism for all the backup partitions on that drive.
Maybe I should try to find small drives and use two of them! Or more!

OTOH, I spend much less time writing to the backup than I do writing and
reading the internal harddrives, so maybe the backup drive will really
never wear out and it's fine to use it for as many partitions as will
easily fit.

What say ye?


Question 2, btw. On a couple occasions, I got some early warning of
drive failure because the drive went click click. What happens with a
laptop. It seems like if it went click click, it wouldn't make enough
noise for me to hear it. Do laptop harddrives, 2.5", last longer than
desktop?

In message , micky
writes:
[]
Question 2, btw. On a couple occasions, I got some early warning of
drive failure because the drive went click click. What happens with a
laptop. It seems like if it went click click, it wouldn't make enough
noise for me to hear it. Do laptop harddrives, 2.5", last longer than
desktop?

I don't know the answer to your questions, but sounds like there's at
least some chance you're doing as I did, hoping to get some advance
warning of failure. Don't do it (-:! Mine (laptop drive) failed suddenly
and without warning: I eventually found out that (at least it seems this
was what happened) one of the heads had stuck to the surface, stopping
the discs rotating; fortunately, I have access to a positive-pressure
clean-air cupboard, and was able to turn the platters, and the drive
then came back to life (well, enough for me to get data off - I'm not
trusting it and have replaced it).

I _think_ if a laptop drive has something similar to what makes a
desktop one click, you'd still hear it - though more of a tinkling than
knocking - but don't rely on it (-:!
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to
be doing at the moment. -Robert Benchley, humorist, drama critic, and actor
(1889-1945)

No need to worry about wearing out the backup drive. As long as it's not
a desktop HD enclosed in a non-ventilated enclosure, in which case I'd
blow a fan at it.

You can use the Hard Disk Sentinel trial version to check the condition
of your drives.

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at

Thanks, robots.

micky wrote:
I don't save videos or anything really big (I only hae 100Gig of files
now) so when I ended up with a 1.5T harddrive for a backup drive, I
thought I'd put both internal HD's on the same external backup.
Plenty of space. I also put my laptop and the laptop of a friend's,
(that I was fiddling with and who I knew didn't do backups.) Plenty of
space! Enough for my second desktop too, when I get that running.

(I forget what you call what I'm using. A caddy, that's it!! It's a
USB plugin by BlacX and it has two slots, and each accepts a 3.5" bare
hardddrive (or 2.5" harddrive). You can even copy from one slot to the
other.)

But now it occurs to me that while I'm backing up one drive, I"ll be
wearing out the mechanism for all the backup partitions on that drive.
Maybe I should try to find small drives and use two of them! Or more!

OTOH, I spend much less time writing to the backup than I do writing and
reading the internal harddrives, so maybe the backup drive will really
never wear out and it's fine to use it for as many partitions as will
easily fit.

What say ye?


Question 2, btw. On a couple occasions, I got some early warning of
drive failure because the drive went click click. What happens with a
laptop. It seems like if it went click click, it wouldn't make enough
noise for me to hear it. Do laptop harddrives, 2.5", last longer than
desktop?

No storage device is infinitely reliable, so you
use two of them, and you alternate. With that
redundancy in place, you no longer need to be
fixated on "partitioning" of your backup drive.

Use the Health tab in HDTune, to read out the
SMART statistics. This one is free and doesn't
nag you. It's getting a bit old now, but still
does the job for this purpose.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

If the Reallocated Sector field value goes non-zero,
it's time to change the drive. The field is
"thresholded", and when it reads zero, it really
isn't zero. There are always a few bad sectors on
a new drive. To prevent "cherry picking" when
purchasing drives, the indicator doesn't come
off the zero value, until a significant number
of reallocations have occurred. So when it
goes non-zero, there are already a significant
number of substitutions that have been done.
And if you see the rate growing rapidly after that,
it gives you extra incentive to swap immediately.

I've had hard drives with so many reallocations,
it started to affect the read benchmark (drive
became slow enough, I started to notice, and I
started checking it). There was a "low performance area"
on one hard drive about 70GB wide, while the
reallocations still read "zero". I took the
drive out of service anyway.

While SMART offers no guarantees, it's still better
than having no tool at all for evaluating a hard drive.

Paul

Ed Light wrote:
No need to worry about wearing out the backup drive. As long as it's not
a desktop HD enclosed in a non-ventilated enclosure, in which case I'd
blow a fan at it.

As an aside, Vantec makes some HD enclosures (e.g. some NexStar series) that
effectively uses the metal case as a heat sink, so even having a fan isn't
always necessary. They have been working out great over here.

In message , Paul
writes:
[]
No storage device is infinitely reliable, so you
use two of them, and you alternate. With that

Agreed ...

redundancy in place, you no longer need to be
fixated on "partitioning" of your backup drive.

.... although I wouldn't let it enter into the partition-or-not debate.

Use the Health tab in HDTune, to read out the
SMART statistics. This one is free and doesn't
nag you. It's getting a bit old now, but still
does the job for this purpose.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

If the Reallocated Sector field value goes non-zero,
it's time to change the drive. The field is
"thresholded", and when it reads zero, it really
isn't zero. There are always a few bad sectors on
a new drive. To prevent "cherry picking" when
purchasing drives, the indicator doesn't come
off the zero value, until a significant number
of reallocations have occurred. So when it
goes non-zero, there are already a significant
number of substitutions that have been done.
And if you see the rate growing rapidly after that,
it gives you extra incentive to swap immediately.

But be aware that different utilities display this parameter in
different ways. DiskCheckup (my copy says it's from www.passmark.com and
is free for personal use) is displaying Reallocated Sector Count as:
Status: OK; Value: 100; Worst: 100; Threshold: 5; Raw Value: 0. (For a
fairly new drive.) [I've just checked - it's still free for personal,
from http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm - only a 1.59M
download, _can't_ be any good (-:!]

But SMART parameters are only an indicator of course - my drive that
stuck was showing as fine by SMART.
[]
While SMART offers no guarantees, it's still better
than having no tool at all for evaluating a hard drive.

Paul

Indeed!
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Anybody who thinks there can be unlimited growth in a static, limited
environment, is either mad or an economist. - Sir David Attenborough, in
Radio Times 10-16 November 2012

micky wrote

I don't save videos or anything really big (I only hae 100Gig of files
now) so when I ended up with a 1.5T harddrive for a backup drive,
I thought I'd put both internal HD's on the same external backup.
Plenty of space. I also put my laptop and the laptop of a friend's,
(that I was fiddling with and who I knew didn't do backups.) Plenty
of space! Enough for my second desktop too, when I get that running.

(I forget what you call what I'm using. A caddy, that's it!! It's a
USB plugin
by BlacX and it has two slots, and each accepts a 3.5" bare hardddrive
(or 2.5" harddrive). You can even copy from one slot to the other.)

But now it occurs to me that while I'm backing up one drive, I"ll be
wearing out the mechanism for all the backup partitions on that drive.

Not too clear what you mean by that.

Using the drive as a destination for a new backup will have
no effect on the other backups that are on that backup drive.

Maybe I should try to find small drives and use two of them! Or more!

Or why you think that would help either. Maybe some idea
that there will be some effect on the backups that are also
on the single backup drive. That isn't true.

OTOH, I spend much less time writing to the backup than I do writing and
reading the internal harddrives, so maybe the backup drive will really
never wear out and it's fine to use it for as many partitions as will
easily fit.

What say ye?

Yes, that second alternative is correct.

But you do have all the backups on a single drive and any single
drive can fail and if it does you might well lose all your backups.
With more than one backup drive, you only lose the one.

Not that that is a massive problem, you normally just replace
the failed backup drive and do fresh backups to it if it fails.

The only time that can bite is if one of the internal drives fails and
the backup drive fails at the same time so you have no backup to
use to write to the replacement internal drive. That can certainly
happen if you leave the backup drive in the dock and something
like a power supply failure kills both drives at the same time.

Doesn't usually happen with a laptop tho.

Question 2, btw. On a couple occasions, I got some early warning of
drive failure because the drive went click click. What happens with a
laptop. It seems like if it went click click, it wouldn't make enough
noise for me to hear it. Do laptop harddrives, 2.5", last longer than
desktop?

Not usually, mainly because they don't get cooled as well as in desktop
systems and get a pretty hard life in a laptop where they can get whacked
or dropped when spinning etc. OTOH they are designed more robustly
because they do get used laptops.

But with a backup drive, it isn't hard to knock the backup drive off
the table when its spinning and certainly laptop drives are more
likely to survive that than 3.5" drives are. One the other hand
backup drives in 2.5" format are a lot easier to knock off too.

Also, I would run a complete self-test on each drive. The maker's
utility is handy for that, or HD Sentinel. They can get hot if not
ventilated.
--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at

Thanks, robots.

On Thu, 28 May 2015 18:14:13 -0700, Ed Light
wrote:

Also, I would run a complete self-test on each drive. The maker's
utility is handy for that, or HD Sentinel. They can get hot if not
ventilated.

I'm using a BlacX caddy, the 2-slot model.

I bought a closed enclosure at first, impressed as I was by how cheap
they were, but changing drives for testing was such a nuisance. This
caddy does everything the closed box does and more, except for travel.

micky wrote:
On Thu, 28 May 2015 18:14:13 -0700, Ed Light
wrote:

Also, I would run a complete self-test on each drive. The maker's
utility is handy for that, or HD Sentinel. They can get hot if not
ventilated.

I'm using a BlacX caddy, the 2-slot model.

I bought a closed enclosure at first, impressed as I was by how cheap
they were, but changing drives for testing was such a nuisance. This
caddy does everything the closed box does and more, except for travel.

They call them docking stations.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153066

Paul