SSD question

Forester1

Well-known member
Greetings! I have been contemplating getting a large SSD (Terabytes), to more or less be a backup drive. I currently use USB thumb drives for music and audiobooks for my car, and I note that when I get a big thumb drive, copying hundreds of GB of music and audio books tends to heat up the thumb drives quite hot. Sometimes I will pause the copy process and let them cool a bit, because they seem to get so hot. I am wondering if any of you have noticed whether SSD drives are the same way? I would hate to get an SSD drive and start to copy huge amounts of data and walk away while the SSD fries. Has anyone noticed this at all?
 
Basically they are the same inside but like all computers heat is a problem. Good quality external SSDs have lots of heat sink to dissipate the heat. Cheaper ones skimp on the heat sinks amongst other things.

A better solution I think would be something like an 8 Tb WD blue drive inside a Ugreen external case. The limiting factor on backup is the USB 3 and the data transfer rate is about the same for a hard drive or an SSD.

Cheerio John
 
No, but my SSDs are tucked I side my PC where I'd never know. They're properly mounted on an aluminum bracked a bolted to a metal case where a fan moves air over all my drives.

Bottom line, if copying a load of files blow up the drive, it was already bad you just exposed its fault.
 
Mulling I get the impression we aren't talking PC here but something else which means you need a device that is powered off the USB port.

If so then I'd think in terms of a Samsung SSD, they make the stuff inside and the drives are small enough to put in your pocket.

An alternative might be your router may have an USB port. I use hard drives for backup but I have a Samsung SSD on the router which is shared to any network device as an SMB device. SSDs are about .10 cents per gig, WD blue around .02 cents per gig.

Cheerio John
 
Greetings! I have been contemplating getting a large SSD (Terabytes), to more or less be a backup drive. I currently use USB thumb drives for music and audiobooks for my car, and I note that when I get a big thumb drive, copying hundreds of GB of music and audio books tends to heat up the thumb drives quite hot. Sometimes I will pause the copy process and let them cool a bit, because they seem to get so hot. I am wondering if any of you have noticed whether SSD drives are the same way? I would hate to get an SSD drive and start to copy huge amounts of data and walk away while the SSD fries. Has anyone noticed this at all?

If you're gonna get an SSD, you have two options. NVMe (goes on your motherboard) or 3.5 inch (goes in a regular hard drive slot in your case). Because NVMe is basically on your motherboard, it has much faster read/write speeds than a 3.5, but both are still incredibly fast. An SSD won't necessarily get hot unless you're copying huge amounts of files over, but just in case, you can probably mount it near a fan on your case as SSDs don't vibrate meaning they can basically be put anywhere in the case. Good luck!
 
If you're gonna get an SSD, you have two options. NVMe (goes on your motherboard) or 3.5 inch (goes in a regular hard drive slot in your case). Because NVMe is basically on your motherboard, it has much faster read/write speeds than a 3.5, but both are still incredibly fast. An SSD won't necessarily get hot unless you're copying huge amounts of files over, but just in case, you can probably mount it near a fan on your case as SSDs don't vibrate meaning they can basically be put anywhere in the case. Good luck!

"I currently use USB thumb drives for music and audiobooks for my car," doesn't sound like the place to use an NVME drive to me.

Cheerio John
 
Thanks guys, you have given me a lot to think about and look into. I appreciate all of your suggestions! My T:ANE and TRS19 installs are both over a TB, so just backing up those two the first time is going to be a major copy session. I backup now to an HDD but want to explore using an SSD. In addition, I have been left the task of digitizing all the family photos going back to the 1890s, and family home videos going back to early 60s, so a lot of storage space there. Since our most recent car does not have a CD drive, I am also ripping a lot of music and audio books onto the computer, so more large libraries. Packrat par excellence, I guess! I have also thought about multi-drive SAN units, but those are expensive and I'd have to pay for multiple drives.
 
ALL drives fail at some time.

If your definition of "backup" is to have a copy available "in case it fails" then I would still recommend using a spinning HDD of a few Terabytes in capacity. HDD's are available in large capacity sizes and more important a stable technology.

SATA & NVME drives are both electronic and the
- SATA drive connects to your system via a cable and power cable usually inside the PC or laptop.
- External SATA drives connect via a cable and enclosure holding the SATA drive.
- NVME drive connect directly to the PC's internal data bus and thus are much faster & usually generate more heat.

There are a number of free programs [see SPECCY] that will will monitor and tell you your drives temperature. I'm not sure if they monitor USB drive temps or not.

Electronic "drives" are still a relatively "new" technology and often when it fails you cannot get the data back. You can probably reformat the drive and use it again for quite some time but in my experience, you will lose the original content. [Note: there are companies that professionally recover data from electronic drives (and spinning HDDs) but they are not cheap.]

Conclusion:
- the cheapest approach for backup is a large capacity older style spinning hard disk drive either internal or external connection. Go external if space or heat is a concern in the PC.
- next is more SATA drives until you run out of cable slots. You can add an adapter to the PC bus to add more SATA ports/drives. Mid level cost.
- finally NVME drives can be added via various connectors to the PC data bus for max performance & cost.

Some laptops allow for a 2nd drive (usually SATA or could be NVME if a newer laptop).
Some older laptops with a CD/DVD drive can be converted to hold a SATA drive if needed.

ANYTHING external would have a limit on data transfer of the connection type. USB 3 and up are quite fast.

M.2 is a form factor only that depicts the size and shape of the above electronic drives. M.2 is often referenced to faster drives but it is not a spec just a shape.

Also, RAID is two or more disk drives of any type above that are configured to provide ongoing backup. That is a topic on its own and beyond this thread.

Hope this helps. Cheers,
wmm1216
 
Thanks guys, you have given me a lot to think about and look into. I appreciate all of your suggestions! My T:ANE and TRS19 installs are both over a TB, so just backing up those two the first time is going to be a major copy session. I backup now to an HDD but want to explore using an SSD. In addition, I have been left the task of digitizing all the family photos going back to the 1890s, and family home videos going back to early 60s, so a lot of storage space there. Since our most recent car does not have a CD drive, I am also ripping a lot of music and audio books onto the computer, so more large libraries. Packrat par excellence, I guess! I have also thought about multi-drive SAN units, but those are expensive and I'd have to pay for multiple drives.

First for backup you need the device to be off line most of the time. This to protect against file encryption malware.

UGREEN External Hard Drive Enclosure for 3.5 2.5 Inch SATA SSD HDD USB 3.0 to SATA III Hard Drive Case with UASP 12V Power Adapter Compatible with WD Seagate Toshiba Samsung Hitachi PS5 Xbox has a power switch so you can put it off line and save a bit of electricity at the same time. This also protects against power surges, if it's off line the power surge can't hit it.

All drives have a MTBF or mean time between failure. If it's high great but reality is any drive can fail at any time. The way to protect against this is to have two backups drives. I use Windows 7 backup in win 10 and I think it's reliable. Plus it doesn't need the backup drive to be online all the time.

The WD Blue drives run 5400ish and lower spin speed means less heat etc and in theory a more reliable drive. They have a two year warranty, but you're only powering them on once a week so that's probably good enough. Their gold drives have a 5 year warranty, traditionally WD drives have had a lower failure rate than other manufacturers.

Cheerio John
 
"I currently use USB thumb drives for music and audiobooks for my car," doesn't sound like the place to use an NVME drive to me.

Cheerio John

Just realized this, guess the info about the NVMe drives is useless in a car! I don't know many cars with an NVMe drive slot.
 
No, but a backup drive could be NVME. I had read that SSD drives are actually starting to be more reliable than HDD drives, but I suppose that depends on price. I certainly would not fall for the 16TB SSD for $49 on Amazon! The ugreen enclosure sounds interesting, as now I have to plug and unplug when I do backups, not that it's that difficult, but handy. Thanks again for all the valuable information guys!
 
No, but a backup drive could be NVME. I had read that SSD drives are actually starting to be more reliable than HDD drives, but I suppose that depends on price. I certainly would not fall for the 16TB SSD for $49 on Amazon! The ugreen enclosure sounds interesting, as now I have to plug and unplug when I do backups, not that it's that difficult, but handy. Thanks again for all the valuable information guys!

Even the high end server grade SSDs have a failure rate. It isn't high but it does exist so even they use some sort of backup. The simplest is HOT swoppable RAID. Then you get into RAID level, raid 5 is the cheapest per Gig but raid 1 is basically mirroring or two copies on two separate drives. Since much of what you're backing up is static photos etc. Having two separate drives works just as well. Yoi can af course use any existing 3.5 Hard drive lying around with the Ugreen enclosure.

You may want to look at opus compression for your pop music and audio books, use exact audio copy to extract and compress. It has better sound quality than mp3 and smaller files. FLAC works best for classical music.

Webp compression is worth looking at for images and photos.

Cheerio John
 
As for the backup itself, I have been using SyncToy 2.1 (free from Microsoft) for years. It allows you to use any type of backup from full to incremental. I have around 3TB of content from my different versions of Trainz (from TS2012 through TS2019) and my backups (aside from the initial backup which will copy everything) the incrementals only take around 2 minutes or so to add or subtract what changed since the last backup, if that long. No need to back up everything each and every time.

Bill
 
Greetings HiBaller! I used to use SyncToy, but for some reason it seemed like it would not work for me anymore, I don't really remember why. I got FreeFileSync, and that has worked very well and very fast for me. I did not buy the real-time version; I just use the free version for manual backups. It also allows me to either "mirror" the current content to backup (as Trainz), or "Update" the backup from current, which adds to but does not subtract from. I use that for photos and music, although it tends to cause duplicates if I have moved or reorganized anything.
John, I do have enough drives that I could lose any one and have a backup somewhere, but my main backup drive is getting full, so that is why I was looking around for a larger drive, and then I could use my current backup drive for other things. Of course, that brought up the idea of copying terabytes of current backup onto an SSD (if that was the choice) and whether that would melt down the SSD.
 
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Even the high end server grade SSDs have a failure rate. It isn't high but it does exist so even they use some sort of backup. The simplest is HOT swoppable RAID. Then you get into RAID level, raid 5 is the cheapest per Gig but raid 1 is basically mirroring or two copies on two separate drives. Since much of what you're backing up is static photos etc. Having two separate drives works just as well. Yoi can af course use any existing 3.5 Hard drive lying around with the Ugreen enclosure.

You may want to look at opus compression for your pop music and audio books, use exact audio copy to extract and compress. It has better sound quality than mp3 and smaller files. FLAC works best for classical music.

Webp compression is worth looking at for images and photos.

Cheerio John

I have a Synology NAS RAID (4 physical drives) system and have several automatic backup plans that run several times a week. It's basically set and forget (mostly). While I have some Trainz backups, I'm more concerned about my development files such as Trainz models, software development (another hobby), and personal stuff. I wouldn't use a thumb drive for a backup and neither would I use an SSD (internal) drive for backups either. Too expensive for the purpose IMHO.

There is nothing wrong with using HDDs. My NAS system uses the 5400rpm technology but my main dev drive is a 2TB 7200rpm, hi transfer rate variety and I hardly notice the difference between that and an SSD. Trainz I run on a 1TB M.2 SSD.

I still don't fully trust SSDs. One stopped dead on me a few years back and it was the Windows boot drive. Nothing I tried worked. At least HDDs might give you some warning of possible failure and a chance to offload stuff.

Networking is easy if you have your wifi/router close by and it has some LAN ports.
 
Greetings HiBaller! I used to use SyncToy, but for some reason it seemed like it would not work for me anymore, I don't really remember why. I got FreeFileSync, and that has worked very well and very fast for me. I did not buy the real-time version; I just use the free version for manual backups.
John, I do have enough drives that I could lose any one and have a backup somewhere, but my main backup drive is getting full, so that is why I was looking around for a larger drive, and then I could use my current backup drive for other things. Of course, that brought up the idea of copying terabytes of current backup onto an SSD (if that was the choice) and whether that would melt down the SSD.

The only argument against SSD is cost. Otherwise it will do anything a hard drive will do. You can retrieve small files that are scattered across the drive faster but when writing there isn't much difference. Hard drives have a cache so you assemble the track in the cache then write it out in one pass.

There are different types of SSD,

https://dellwa.com/ssd/how-much-the-difference-between-slc-and-mlc-sd/

There are no moving parts in an SSD so they run cooler than a similar hard drive. I have MLC SSDs with lots of spare capacity. I brought refurbished workstation from Dell, supposed to be one CPU and one 1TB SSD, there was another couple of 1 TB drives left in there. You need extra space or over provisioning on an SSD. Reading cause no wear but writing and deleting cause wear on an SSD.

Then you get into SD cards, they use the same memory cells as SSDs so they can be an option.

So basically it comes down to cooling and the quality of the memory cells used. The interface makes a difference, PCI4 SSDs are fast if you have a PCI4 motherboard.

You're probably looking at USB connections so maybe a USB powered hub?

Have fun.

Cheerio John
 
There's something like this.

You can mount an NVME drive into an external case.

MAIWO M.2 SATA and NVMe Combo SSD Enclosure with Aluminum Heat Sink Shell, USB3.2 Gen2 Type C 10Gbps. Fits B+M key and M-key M.2 2242,2260,2280,Type C to A and Type C to C Cable Included - Newegg.com

This one is $19.95 and there are other brands. These are meant to hold NVME drives. There are also some for regular SSD drives.

The issue I have with SSD drives is that their longevity is not the same as a regular hard drive. They've gotten better over the years but it's still far less than a regular hard drive which makes me a bit hesitant to use them as backup drives.
 
Thanks Paul. The RAID option would be my ultimate preference, but at this point it is out of my budget. I had RAIDs on servers back in the day and it was great to rebuild one when a drive went bad. Except one Dell server I had with 4 Seagate barracuda drives. These drives were something like 160GB drives, and I got the model number off of the bad drive and ordered a new one. Something had changed just slightly in the way they formatted them, and this one was all of 8MB smaller than the other three. So, the raid would not rebuild! I had to take the server offline, format the other three drives to the same size as the new one, and THEN rebuild the array and restore the data. Ugh! You are correct of course; I don't really need high performance for backups. It was just something I read about SSDs now being more reliable, but I am sure my mileage may vary!

EDIT: Sorry guys, I didn't notice we had gone to page 2, so I am behind on responses. I am starting to think maybe a good quality HDD will probably give me the most bang for the buck. Maybe use the KISS rule and just buy me a backup drive!
 
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