External HDD

[ccowan2126]

I am in the market for an External HDD to store pictures, music and Trainz on. What is the difference, if any, between "External" and "Portable" HDD? What brands are best: Toshiba, Seagate, WD. I personally lean toward Seagate. And finally, as far as trains is concerned, what files need to be saved and how often. I am constantly (every few days) making minor changes to my personal routes, as well as to the Reading & Northern, Eastern Kentucky and Midwest Grain routes, so I would think weekly would be sufficient. When saving these files, will the HDD make NEW ones or will it OVERWRITE the existing files? I am not that good at computer stuff, so this is a little intimidating for me. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Classof55]

External generally refers to drives that sit on your desktop. Portable drives are usually smaller. There are however different connections (E.g. USB, Esata, thunderbolt etc). Western Digital and Seagate Make Some Decent portable hard drives at the moment. If You have the budget Adata and Lacie do some decent solid state drives. If money isn't an issue, then checkout the Angelwing SSD2go drives. Hope this helps.

 

[JCitron]

I have a 3.0TB GoFlex drive from Seagate. It works great and is a real hard drive and not an SSD. I had a Toshiba drive once and it gave me awful trouble so I ditched it for the Seagate which has been very reliable.

Portable hard drives are just that. They usually sit in a smaller case with a short cable, and obtains its power from the computer, whereas the external drive is a larger case and has its own power supply. As far as interfaces go, they can both come with ESata or USB 3.0, with most being USB 3.0. With USB 3.0, they seem pretty fast.

To be honest, I am a bit touchy with SSD drives for backup. Perhaps with their ever increase reliability they maybe the future, but given how they die suddenly without recovery, what good is that for backups? Backups need to be reliable and available. I'm saying this as a now retired but still paranoid system and network administrator who performed daily backups for a computer room.

For my backups, I use FastCopy and select the complete Trainz TS12 directory. This ensures that I have everything available should I need to reinstall. Instead of reinstalling from DVD/download then going through the patching process, all I do is restore the directory. With FastCopy, once the initial full copy is made, I've setup differential backups to backup what has changed and what is new. The first backup took all night while now the backups take about 45 minutes or less.

http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

The advantage too of having a complete copy is can restore this to my laptop at any kind should I be traveling somewhere for a length of time. I have a decent enough laptop to use TS12 with full sliders so the performance is not an issue.

Hope this helps.

John

 

[ccowan2126]

For my backups, I use FastCopy and select the complete Trainz TS12 directory. This ensures that I have everything available should I need to reinstall. Instead of reinstalling from DVD/download then going through the patching process, all I do is restore the directory. With FastCopy, once the initial full copy is made, I've setup differential backups to backup what has changed and what is new. The first backup took all night while now the backups take about 45 minutes or less.

Is "FastCopy" a download I should purchase to install on the HDD when I get it? That sound like what I need. I am looking at the Seagate Backup Plus 1TB on Amazon for $80. All I want to be able to do is save my pictures, downloaded music from my iTunes and keep an up to date copy of Trainz in case my laptop and/or gaming desktop crash and burn. I just did not want to periodically "save" pictures, songs and Trainz and end up with multiple copies of things.

 

[johnwhelan]

One of the web sites I think it was Tom's did an article on hard drive reliability, its actually very hard to do, they did it by comparing sales volume to the number of drives that came into have data recovered at one of the big data recovery centers and the age of the drives. Western Digital came out as the most reliable drive manufacturer. It was some time ago and at the time WD warranty was generally longer than Seagate warranty.

Hitachi used to make the drives for IBM and gained a very good reputation in data centers for reliability, Toshiba brought the drive division out when the parent company was taken over by one of the other drive companies and Toshiba still sell the same drives today so Toshiba should be fairly reliable although they don't have the brand name.

I have a Seagate, a WD, a 3 Terra gig Toshiba and a samsung external drive which I use with Windows backup and Win7. The Toshiba is greater than 2 Terra gigs so Windows backup won't recognise it. The others all seem to work nicely, I still do a little bit of support and on one of my supported machines I run a WD passport with the WD passport back up software which works fine. I really ought to sit down and configure Win backup for it some time since win backup also provides a restore disk. It takes its power from the USB cable though and although recent motherboards are fine with this I've seen earlier ones be burnt out by people plugging in Ipods to recharge them.

Cheerio John

 

[Classof55]

SSDs and Reliability? SSD technology has moved on and become more reliable. Backing up is more important. Anyone using a single drive, regardless is asking for trouble. Not using an SSD means that USB 3 and Esata will not be used to their full transfer potential. People who play Microsoft Flight Simulator X will tell you how important it is to squeeze ever bit of speed that you can from your system as simulators so graphically intensive.

As for backups, there are so many options, in including software, storage, RAID configurations etc, there is no excuse not to back up.

 

[JCitron]

Is "FastCopy" a download I should purchase to install on the HDD when I get it? That sound like what I need. I am looking at the Seagate Backup Plus 1TB on Amazon for $80. All I want to be able to do is save my pictures, downloaded music from my iTunes and keep an up to date copy of Trainz in case my laptop and/or gaming desktop crash and burn. I just did not want to periodically "save" pictures, songs and Trainz and end up with multiple copies of things.

FastCopy is free. The link I posted is from the program. You can look it up on Bing or Google and get the link too.

Just install the program and run it just like any program. It's very easy to install and use.

Re the Seagate backup program, actually Acronis Lite, is okay for archiving but not good for quick access. For Trainz you want quick access as FastCopy just copies the files as is and doesn't compress them into a proprietary file format. You could use the Seagate Backup for things you don't want to have access to all the time such as iTunes files, older photos, and documents. That program, by default builds multiple backup archives based on date and time.

I understand the multiple copy issue. With FC you specify the destination directory and it will copy in and append any changes to that directory so the install is the same as what you have on your hard drive. There are no additional backups of that data unless you specify a new destination. This is how I build my travel copy as it's everything I've worked on and downloaded up to that point in time. If you want to keep the old directory, type in a new destination directory. It's just copying your files to wherever you want to put them without that blasted calculating files message. The one that takes forever to calculate on the system and then finally copies the files. Instead it bypasses that and works at the system level and much faster.

There is one problem with the archiving program which I forgot to mention and I ran into a few years ago. A user, a VP at work mind you, was doing what he thought were periodic backups. The program went through the motions, even said successful backup in the done message, etc. The problem was it didn't backup anything recent because he had run out of disk space on his backup drive. I sure hope they have since fixed that and it's not still an issue!

John

 

[ccowan2126]

Thanks, John. You have been a big help.

 

[jeffmorris]

I bought a Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1TB portable HDD because I work on computers at home and at the program for mentally-handicapped people. It was faster than an USB flash drive. The files that I'm working on are kept on the portable HDD.

 

[johnwhelan]

SSDs and Reliability? SSD technology has moved on and become more reliable. Backing up is more important. Anyone using a single drive, regardless is asking for trouble. Not using an SSD means that USB 3 and Esata will not be used to their full transfer potential. People who play Microsoft Flight Simulator X will tell you how important it is to squeeze ever bit of speed that you can from your system as simulators so graphically intensive.

As for backups, there are so many options, in including software, storage, RAID configurations etc, there is no excuse not to back up.

I'm not quite sure I agree with you about SSD technology has moved on and become more reliable. In the mass market the basic cells are NAND because they are cheaper than anything else accessed by MLC again cause its cheaper. SLC access is more reliable but that drives the cost up. The Samsung 840 series is a good compromise but there are a number of different approaches all of which depend on statistically detecting where a number of electrons are at a point in time. It is not possible to say where one particular electron will be at a point in time so we rely on statistics. However to keep costs down we use ever decreasing size which reduces the number of electrons involved and the smaller sample size means that the statistics aren't so reliable.

Cheerio John

 

[cascaderailroad]

Concerning different types of external hard drives, I have a Western Digital 3.0+2.0 USB 2TB external hard drive, and as these are not a SSD (solid state drive), for they have internal moving parts (movable disc fingers) like most hard drives do ...

An SSD (Solid State HD) has no moving parts ...

Which of these is not OK to defrag ?

I have heard that a regular HD is OK to defrag, but a SSD is not OK to be defragged ?

What is the diference between a SATA , and an E-SATA, external HD ?

Does a HD connected via a USB cable mean that Trainz will lag ?

 

[captainkman]

I bought a Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1TB portable HDD because I work on computers at home and at the program for mentally-handicapped people. It was faster than an USB flash drive. The files that I'm working on are kept on the portable HDD.

Hi there,

I also had a WD My Passport drive (Mine was only 500GB), but it failed completely in 2 months. The My Passport range is the lowest you can go as far as portable drives go. WD put their bottom-of-the-range cheap drives in those, and it shows.

I do not recommend one for Trainz use!

I currently use a rather large external hard drive, a Seagate Expansion Drive with a storage capacity of 2TB. This has already lasted a month past the old one and is not showing any signs of imminent failure.

Avoid portable drives for Trainz, get one with its own external power supply.

Kieran.

 

[NeonTheGriffon]

I'm not quite sure I agree with you about SSD technology has moved on and become more reliable. In the mass market the basic cells are NAND because they are cheaper than anything else accessed by MLC again cause its cheaper. SLC access is more reliable but that drives the cost up. The Samsung 840 series is a good compromise but there are a number of different approaches all of which depend on statistically detecting where a number of electrons are at a point in time. It is not possible to say where one particular electron will be at a point in time so we rely on statistics. However to keep costs down we use ever decreasing size which reduces the number of electrons involved and the smaller sample size means that the statistics aren't so reliable.

Cheerio John

Well I sure hope the SSD in the MacBook Pro with Retina Display is reliable enough, because I'm not going to go to the Apple store in a few months and blow $2,500 on a laptop to have the storage crap out.

 

[johnwhelan]

Concerning different types of external hard drives, I have a Western Digital 3.0+2.0 USB 2TB external hard drive, and as these are not a SSD (solid state drive), for they have internal moving parts (movable disc fingers) like most hard drives do ...

An SSD (Solid State HD) has no moving parts ...

Which of these is not OK to defrag ?

I have heard that a regular HD is OK to defrag, but a SSD is not OK to be defragged ?

What is the diference between a SATA , and an E-SATA, external HD ?

Does a HD connected via a USB cable mean that Trainz will lag ?

Defragging helps by putting all the bits of a file together so it gets read by one swoop of the disk head. It doesn't really help that much in Trainz as the files are so small most fit in the minimum disk slot of the hard disk. Its more helpful when the files are large and loaded all at once. Win 7 file system tends to cluster files together so that the head will pick up multiple files at the same pass. This is different to defragging which was bore important on XP.

SDD there is no head and each write wears the disk out. So no advantage speed wise.

USB depends on the USB level, 3.0 is quite fast, the drive connected, the version of the operating system, the drivers and remember that Trainz normally is not limited by disk but having a faster disk means things such as scenery objects appear faster, frames per second it doesn't make that much difference.

Cheerio John

 

[Classof55]

Re Questions

What is the diference between a SATA , and an E-SATA, external HD ?
Does a HD connected via a USB cable mean that Trainz will lag ?[/QUOTE]

Sata is the connection for internal drives and Esata external ("E" External)).
Trainz should not lag because of using USB3, but may do with USB2. Other areas of a system may also be the cause lag. It also depends of your Trianz settings.