Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How long will it last? Maybe not past tomorrow. Maybe 10 years. I had one crash in a few days. Luckily the contents were backed up to an online service and I could rebuild the clients drive overnight.
There is no pat answer.
It all depends on how much you use the hard drive. For example, I just replaced the internal hard drives with SSDs on both a 2009 iMac and a 2010 MacBook's Pro, and these internal drives were working day in and day out. But there is nothing wrong with the hard drives, so I can use them as startup drives if I ever need to do so. I have several external hard drives that are over 12 years old and still working fine. Also have several newer hard drives from 1TB to 6TB that I use for storing the photos I edit on my computer (in TIFF format). But again, I only connect and energize the external hard drives for a short period of time every other week or longer, then turn them off and put them away.
How long will it last? Maybe not past tomorrow. Maybe 10 years. I had one crash in a few days. Luckily the contents were backed up to an online service and I could rebuild the clients drive overnight.
There is no pat answer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RayinAK
It all depends on how much you use the hard drive. For example, I just replaced the internal hard drives with SSDs on both a 2009 iMac and a 2010 MacBook's Pro, and these internal drives were working day in and day out. But there is nothing wrong with the hard drives, so I can use them as startup drives if I ever need to do so. I have several external hard drives that are over 12 years old and still working fine. Also have several newer hard drives from 1TB to 6TB that I use for storing the photos I edit on my computer (in TIFF format). But again, I only connect and energize the external hard drives for a short period of time every other week or longer, then turn them off and put them away.
How much can a drive be used in a few days? iirc it was less than two weeks.
How much can a drive be used in a few days? iirc it was less than two weeks.
I don't know what to tell you other than this: since I could not afford perhaps ten or more 2-6TB SSDs, I store thousands of very large TIFF images on hard drives. Some of the smaller hard drives are over 10-12 years old, and still working fine. Some other people use a hard drive RAID system, which also works well, but I prefer the cheaper USB/SATA dock station and a bunch of hard drives.
The OP does have a couple of choices as follows: an external 2TB hard drive, or an external 2TB SSD, since he is paying for it. But in my case it makes no sense for me to use an external expensive SSD just to "occasionally" backup the internal hard drive. I can do the same (in duplicate) on two hard drives at a fraction of the cost.
There is nothing to tell me. I've had working hard drives for a decade or more. I've had hard drives fail anywhere from a couple of weeks or so to 6 months.
It has nothing to do with anything except a failure rate.
I have a number of HDD spinning happily for years, at least 5 for all of them, and two for over 10 years. YMMV.
One downside of online backup seldom discussed is that the initial backup can take months if you have a lot of data - say 500GB or more. This is mostly because all of the firms I'm aware of throttle your upload speed. Some vendors used to offer seeded backups, where they'd send you a drive to fill and send back to them, but I know of no one doing that in consumer space now.
I have a number of HDD spinning happily for years, at least 5 for all of them, and two for over 10 years. YMMV.
One downside of online backup seldom discussed is that the initial backup can take months if you have a lot of data - say 500GB or more. This is mostly because all of the firms I'm aware of throttle your upload speed. Some vendors used to offer seeded backups, where they'd send you a drive to fill and send back to them, but I know of no one doing that in consumer space now.
1.4TB @ 1 1/2 years. Now it uploads changes in a reasonable period of time. It helps that I pruned it down to under 1TB.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
