Windows Backup
- Thread starter eagle488
- Start date
Quote from Banjo:
This is a cool tool. The USB won't be as fast as a sata port. I use the following setup. My asus mother board has 2 sata connections, I have 2 sata drives in the box and use casper xp to copy once a week. I have a sata controller card in a pci slot with an internal sata connection and an external sata connection.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816113001
The internal connection is used for a removable hd that is copied to from the c drive and removed from the machine.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817122105
I use yet another enclosure drive connected to the external port on the card at times.
If you've ever lost a drive with everything on it, you don't mess around with chance anymore.
the hard disk has some internal monitoring and when you keep an eye on that then you have advance warning of a hard disk failing.
but for the money that hard disks cost once they get two years old I just replace them - waiting until failure (and you are in the middle of a trade) is not the best strategy.
Maria
No but that is a good idea, just ran it now, this is for a 120GB 7200rpm Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drive
SiSoftware Sandra 2007
Physical Disk Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 32 MB/s
Random Access Time : 14 ms
File Systems Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 27 MB/s
Random Access Time : 14 ms
Benchmark Breakdown
Buffered Read : 30 MB/s
Sequential Read : 32 MB/s
Random Read : 22 MB/s
Buffered Write : 25 MB/s
Sequential Write : 25 MB/s
Random Write : 25 MB/s
Random Access Time : 14 ms (estimated)
Drive
Drive Type : Hard Disk
Total Size : 114GB
Free Space : 104GB, 91%
Cluster Size : 4kB
I see someone else has already answered it (S.M.A.R.T.)
However it will not prevent dried up bearings & dropping of hard disks (laptops) although in the latter case Lenovo (ex-IBM) has come up with "active protection system" which measures the acceleration of the machine and then parks the heads if it thinks there is going to be a hard knock.
The mechanical failure (bearings drying up or something else) is the reason that I replace every two years the HD. (Had once a 20Mb Seagate that had to "warm up" before the spindle would run at a decent speed, normally about 10 minutes.... Those were the days that them HD were costing you a small fortune.)
The HD monitoring software is good for capturing bad blocks which used to be a major reason for (gradual) HD failure however more recently I am getting the impression that HD failure is more related to other causes and often more sudden.
Maria