New portable hard drive

[Gene Pink]

I needed yet another portable 2.5" 2T drive, went to the store, and they had a 3T for about 30 bucks more, 2T=$90, 3T=$120. Since the backups of backups of backups are only getting bigger, I went for the 3T as I will need more than 2TB soon enough..

They always come with an array of garbage already on them, so I deep format the thing nice and clean. Took 53 hours.

Copy a 1.4TB backup folder from another drive to this new one, it is now on hour 27, with an estimated 5 hours left. Transfer rate is around 14 MB/sec. Everything involved is USB-3.

Does this sound right? USB-3 crossyapping should be much faster than that, are the physical drives really that slow?  If so, what's the point of USB3 on pokey-ass drives?

While I was in that store, salivating over the 480G solid state flash drives as an upgrade from the 250G in my laptop,  the salesman dude was straight up, saying: "Once you go flash, there is no going back, almost instant bootups. Buy they are no way as dependable as a mechanical hard drive".

So what do I need a SSD for? The only time I reboot is when windoze update insists on it.

[/rant]

Gene

 

[joaquins]

Is not just reboot, is access to anything on that drive, for example applications. Much faster to open a project while loading DAW, plugins and samples from an SSD rather than HD. Also it could be used as extra RAM (OS dependant), slower than DDR but still quite useful when working on big projects and short of memory.

I have a 128GB SSD in my desktop plus a few HDD (some internal, some USB) 128GB is plenty so far for OS and applications, I guess 256GB would be fine, I don't see the point of more than that right now, unless is the only drive on the sister (laptop) hybrid drives were a cool idea but not as nice as having separate HDD and SSD. I'm back with desktop, my phone covers my mobile needs, not so much sense to have a laptop as it did a few years ago, at least for me.

JS

 

[PRR]

File-count sometimes matters more than total data size or wire-speed.

Windows is blazing-fast for 128 files but exponentially slower for larger file-counts.

(You should be using unix for deep data, but  unix working through an NTFS system may not be that much faster than Windows on NTFS.)

I don't see any point in a deep file-wipe on a new (factory frilled) drive. A quick format will zero the directory structure very fast. Nobody will be looking deeper than that (except KGB/NSA). Boot-sector virii may not be purged, but neither will a full-format do that, unless you also make it bootable (and even then the boot sector is not always wiped, sometimes just verified as apparently bootable).