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I’m about to purchase a new external hard drive, for backup purposes. I was looking for advice on the best type to buy.
The salesperson I spoke to favoured a 2.5″ portable drive, citing advantages over a 3.5″ powered drive, on the grounds of adapter failure. Is this a valid concern?
The main brands available for purchase are Western Digital and Seagate – are there any concerns with these brands?
Thanks.
I’ve always preferred Western Digital MyBook external drives. The very first one I bought quite a few years ago, a 512 MB model, still works fine. All of them since (1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB) also work fine. The most recent one I bought was model WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN and it’s been flawless.
If I were to get another one right now it would be a Western Digital MyBook 4 TB or possibly 6 TB drive. I think they’ve updated their 4 TB model to WDBBGB0040HBK-NESN.
I reformatted all mine before use using the Western Digital utility software provided, but they claim you shouldn’t have to.
I do nightly backups to 3 of these drives, which are permanently connected to my hardware systems.
-Noel
We considered the 3tb drive, as the additional cost for an extra tb seemed unreasonable at 40% dearer.
So far, I’ve not had to replace an adapter yet (touch wood) 
I once read a piece of advice about silicon RAM which is buy the most you can afford, it seems to be applicable to drives. Forty percent above the price of the does seem unreasonable, because each model probably might have the same number of platters & heads. A buyer might just be paying most of that cost for the newest higher density recording technology.
May your adapters stay fit for purpose a long time.
Here is the best way to use an external drive for doing backups, if you have a desktop computer:
* Purchase a long (3 feet) SATA data extension cable and a long SATA power extension cable. Connect them inside the computer, and extend them out of the case, so that there is at least one foot of cable outside of the case.
* Purchase a standard SATA internal hard drive.
* When you want to do a backup, power down, connect the hard drive you purchased to the external SATA cables, and power up. (Make sure to de-static your hands before handling the drive, and don’t touch any contacts.)
* Do a backup.
* Power down, disconnect the hard drive, and power up.
* Put the drive in a static bag, and store it until the next backup.
* Keep a piece of paper with the drive; everytime you do a backup, put the date and what you backed up, along with any other comments, on the piece of paper.
If you have a laptop, or if you otherwise don’t want to go through all of that, you could get a USB external hard drive, and plug it in as needed (whenever you are going to do a backup), then unplug it afterward. But there are possible issues with external USB hard drives:
* Sometimes they fail. (I have had two which have failed over the years; and a friend had one which failed.)
* I had a friend who bought a Seagate (?) USB external hard drive a few years ago. There was encryption software built into the SATA-to-USB circuitry that is in the external drive case. The problem was, that circuitry went bad, and so he could no longer access the data on the drive.
All of the USB external drives will work when connected to a USB 2.0 port. But if the drive is USB 3.0 compliant, the backup will go a lot faster if it is plugged into a USB 3.0 port.
I am concerned that many USB external drives don’t have their own power source (i.e. an A.C. adapter); they draw power over the USB line. Although I’ve never seen one of these types of hard drives fail, I’ve seen other USB devices fail that depended on USB power. I personally wouldn’t purchase a USB external hard drive that didn’t have its own power supply, unless it was a solid state drive (SSD). Even with an SSD, I would prefer that it had its own power supply.
Be sure to make a good rescue / emergency boot disk via your backup software. If your drive crashes and you have to restore to a new drive, you will be able to boot from the rescue disk and do the restore. That rescue disk will be a lifesaver in that case.
Better yet, buy two external drives and rotate them for backups. That way if one fails, and it probably will, you are still covered.
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
If your computer gets hit with malware, one of your backup drives might get hit. Yet another good reason to have two backup drives and rotate them.
That would also seem a very good reason to ensure you do not keep the drives always-connected to the computer…
Exactly.
The limit is not OS related, it’s disk format related.
Either ExFAT or NTFS will allow you to use the full capacity.
cheers, Paul
I took an 9$ pogoplug blue and followed some instructions to install Linux over it. Now it runs OpenWRT w/luci.
Hooked a USB2 1TB 2.5″ Western Digital drive to it and scheduled a task on Windows to run a sysimage to it weekly.
Every night on my system I disable the ethernet. My base OS/w installed software is kept under 22gig; everything else is pushed to the NAS(s) plural.
I’ve always preferred Western Digital MyBook external drives. The very first one I bought quite a few years ago, a 512 MB model, still works fine. All of them since (1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB) also work fine. The most recent one I bought was model WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN and it’s been flawless. If I were to get another one right now it would be a Western Digital MyBook 4 TB or possibly 6 TB drive. I think they’ve updated their 4 TB model to WDBBGB0040HBK-NESN. I reformatted all mine before use using the Western Digital utility software provided, but they claim you shouldn’t have to. I do nightly backups to 3 of these drives, which are permanently connected to my hardware systems. -Noel
I just bought a WD Passport 3TB, but Windows Backup (Win 7) won’t recognize it. I had to use WD’s software. Is there any way I can use Windows Backup on it without reformatting the drive? I don’t want to lose the backup I managed to do with WD’s program. (It’s still running after 17 1/2 hours!)
Thank you,
Morty
Skip the proprietary software, give the free Easeus “ToDo” backup program a try. It’s on Woody’s recommended backup software list, and I’ve been using it since before that. I have multiple client systems running nightly backups with it on schedules, I use a weekly differential method, and a full “System Drive” backup once a month.
Can be found here:
https://www.easeus.com/download/tbf-download.html
Start with the free one. You do have to give them an email address to get it, I get one or 2 emails a week from them, just ignore them. Do some small test backups of some folders, then after you get it sorted out, go for your important stuff, or do the full System Backup and make an Emergency Boot ‘disk’, usually on a USB thumb drive so you can restore to a brand new “bare metal” hard disk if necessary, or if your system gets stuck in a blue screen no-boot mode.
I can’t answer that for your drive/situation. If you can ‘browse’ onto it with Windows Explorer, then Easeus should see it, as it or you have to make some sub-directories (folders) on it to put your various backup files in.
If plain old Windows Explorer can’t see your drive’s full capacity, then you might have to re-format it using the NTFS file system. I have a Toshiba 3TB USB hard disk, and Windows 7/Windows Explorer sees it fine.
The problem with proprietary software is…if you have to take it to a shop, or do a restore to another PC that does not have that software…it has to be gotten from the drive company. I’ve run into some weird proprietary software in the past, made it very hard to restore files. The ‘other’ system does have to have a copy of Easeus on it to work with the backup files.
If you download a copy of Easeus, be sure to keep a copy of the downloaded installation program on a USB thumb drive or another computer in case you need it in the future and you can’t get to it on your main computer.
Even the free one should back up that 385 GB you were backing up (hope it got done!!) in maybe 4 hours. The paid-for versions are supposed to be faster, but the speed limit is on the connection: USB 2.0…kind of OK. USB: 3.0 faster. If the backup is scheduled for the middle of the night, not a big deal, just have to check to see the backup job ran and it worked.
Chances are, the only reason you would need to format the external hard drive is if you want to wipe it clean before using it. It should work without any intervention on your part, whether or not you format it, as soon as you plug it in to the USB port of your computer.
You should not need to format the drive as it should be a standard disk. Can you see it in File Explorer? If so any backup program should see it.
The Windows backup software is less flexible than 3rd party free products such as EaseUS, Aomei, Macrium reflect, etc.
cheers, Paul
If it shows up in File Explorer, then you will be able to get a good backup using EaseUS or some other popular aftermarket backup software.
Remember, don’t leave you backup drive plugged in, otherwise it is a second attached drive waiting for a power surge or virus, not a backup drive.
Some(most) external WD drives have the USB controller integrated into the controller card of the drive. If you(or you tech) need to do an emergency recovery there will be no native SATA interface to plug into(after you take the drive out of the enclosure) if you need to recover data. You will either have to do a poor recovery via USB, send the drive away to a super-pro, or solder on your own SATA port (if you can find the pin-out).
For my Windows backup needs, I use Aomei Backupper. It has a free version that can encrypt backup images and perform incremental backups, both of which are impossible in the free version of Macrium Reflect.
Backupper is by far the fastest of any of the Windows imaging programs when writing encrypted images. Nearly all of them slow to a crawl when encryption is turned on, and I’ve tried a bunch: EaseUS, Acronis, Minitools, Paragon, Comodo, and probably several others I cannot recall at the moment. The second fastest after Aomei was Acronis, and it took about twice as long to image my PC (NTFS and EXT4 volumes).
I’ve restored Linux and Windows partititions several times, and it works well. I don’t trust a backup program until I’ve restored enough times to have confidence that its backups work well. Until then, I make backups with more than one program (Acronis or Macrium being the other).
Backupper has a few issues, but they’re not hard to work around for the technically inclined. If you don’t dual-boot Windows and Linux with at least one Linux volume on a GPT partitioned drive, it won’t affect you. There’s a permanent workaround for that too, but there’s no need to go into that just yet.
I’d suggest giving Aomei a try.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
A bit off this topic, but I think the AskWoody Forum could use a ‘hardware/software’ topic somewhere, probably in the AskWoody Support–>PC hardware forum, where we could describe our ‘home’ networks and back up setups. Also, perhaps in a small business where you are the ‘I.T.’ person, supporting that business along with your ‘real’ job.
EG, mine is sort of like Ascaris’: older equipment (salvaged from customer discards/trade-ins) with ‘salvaged’ hard disks (also from customer discards/trade-ins, etc) operating as a server, then a USB 3.0 external HD hung on it for some backups. Also got a good deal around Christmas time on a 2-drive bay diskless “NAS” box with a Gigabit Ethernet port, put 2 more ‘salvaged’ drives in that, in ‘regular’ (non-RAID) mode. Use that for ‘archive’ backups to free up space on the main server for the ‘good’ data.
Also a few other things, but I can save that for the hopefully, new discussion area.
I’ll see about starting a topic where I mentioned, unless some other posters here have a better place.
Excellent idea. That information has probably already been posted at AskWoody, but it is currently scattered around and therefore hard to find.
For some reason I didn’t see your original questions, and my answers didn’t address your questions.
You asked: “The salesperson I spoke to favoured a 2.5″ portable drive, citing advantages over a 3.5″ powered drive, on the grounds of adapter failure. Is this a valid concern?”
I would say that, in my opinion, it is always better to have a drive with its own power supply, rather than depending on the USB line for sufficient power. However, those drives are getting increasingly hard to find.
So if I couldn’t find a drive with its own power supply, my second choice would be to get a USB hub which has its own power, and connect the external hard drive to the hub. In this way, the hard drive, and all other devices plugged into the USB hub, will get plenty of power. If all of your USB devices draw their power from the USB line, and you have several power-hungry devices all plugged in at the same time, the drive and the other devices might not get sufficient power. However, if you have a powered USB hub, the USB hub will provide plenty of power for everything that is directly plugged into it.
In a pinch, you could plug your external drive into one of the onboard USB ports; but if I had to do that, I would unplug all other USB devices except for the mouse and keyboard, to free up as much USB power as possible for the hard drive.
Jim
First, about 2.5″ Vs. 3.5″ Just hold a 2.5 in one hand and a 3.5 in the other. It’s pretty obvious the 3.5 is easily 20 times the mass. My experience is that 3.5’s outlast 2.5’s by at least twice. Yes the 2.5 is dramatically more portable, but should you really be carting that around anyway. If you are connecting to a network, you do not need portability
Second, I would never buy an assembled external drive. I buy a drive housing and a separate OEM hard drive and assemble them. Very easy to do. You then have the advantage of choosing the best of hardware for both components.
Choose a drive enclosure that is roomy and made of metal. Hard drives generate heat — a lot of it. You want an enclosure that will provide a fairly cool environment. Heat is the one of the things that will kill a drive.
Choose a housing that has the connectors you prefer, exSATA, USB 3 for example. You can find really good housing for like $25.
A 3TB 3.5″ drive of excellent quality can be found for under $100US.
When you buy an external drive, you do not know what is inside.
CT
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